Alexandria, Va. – With the smiling al-Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui sitting only 10 feet from him, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York recalled how the sight of people jumping from the burning World Trade Center will stay with him all his life.
Giuliani, testifying Thursday in the trial that will determine whether Moussaoui is put to death or spends the rest of his days in prison, told of seeing a man plunge 100 stories to his death from the Trade Center’s north tower.
But horrible as the sight was, it was only the beginning.
Moments later, the former mayor said, he saw several more people jump, including two who held hands all the way down. “That image comes back to me every day,” Giuliani told a jury in U.S. District Court here.
The former mayor, whose cool presence on Sept. 11, 2001, was seen by many as the defining moment of his time in office, did not look at Moussaoui. Instead, Giuliani used a pointer and a 3 1/2-foot scale model of the twin towers to depict what he saw that sunny morning.
His day had begun routinely, with breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel at 55th Street and Fifth Avenue, Giuliani related. Then an aide told him that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center, and Giuliani rushed downtown.
“By the time the second plane hit, we knew it was a terrorist attack,” Giuliani told the jurors, who listened raptly.
As the former mayor testified, Moussaoui stared at him. Then, when prosecutors played videotapes of the twin towers’ destruction, Moussaoui smiled.
Judge Leonie Brinkema told the jurors the decision on whether Moussaoui should be executed is theirs alone. The jurors concluded on Monday that death could at least be considered for Moussaoui because he was responsible for some of the Sept. 11 deaths.
This phase of the trial, in which jurors will weigh aggravating circumstances against mitigating ones, is expected to last several weeks.
Prosecutors have argued that Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan heritage, could have prevented the carnage of Sept. 11 if only he had told investigators what he knew after he was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota a few weeks before the attacks.
The chief prosecutor, Robert Spencer, told the jurors on Thursday that they would hear relatives of victims describe their own anguish.
And, he said, they will hear the last words of some victims on “the darkest day in recent American history.”
“It will be painful and emotional to hear, but it will be necessary,” Spencer said. “Those voices will be all you need to hear.”
He told the jurors that what they hear would make them sad but make Moussaoui “very, very happy” because he was “proud to have done his part.”
“The only punishment that fits this crime is the death penalty,” Spencer said.
Gerald Zerkin, a court-appointed lawyer for Moussaoui, portrayed his client as an al-Qaeda hanger-on sliding in and out of mental illness.