No Assumptions

Yes, the photograph made a special place in her heart but she never tried to cook up a backstory behind it. She was curious but she never assumed. “I have always said to myself about the photo that I try not to think about what the story behind it is, and that I just want to get the photo back. I would like to just, sort of in my mind—I really resisted being fatalistic about the photo and thought that this could just be a photo that was in someone’s office or someone that made it out alive,” said the young professor.

Her Contribution

After the 9/11 attacks, people came together to show their support and Elizabeth was doing her part in this way. “It was my small contribution, trying to do something good in conjunction to 9/11. The purpose for me was to bring some small comfort to someone,” she recalls the efforts.

Deserved More Exposure

Elizabeth knew that just sharing the picture with her friends and family was not enough anymore. She knew the photograph deserved an exposure to more and more people to get back to the right person what she didn’t know was how it should be done. Hence, once again what she had been doing for years… Also, there was one fact that Elizabeth agreed with.

A Hidden Fact

Elizabeth agreed to the fact that she found the photograph lying close to the Ground Zero. Although she couldn’t say it for a fact that the photograph was connected to the attacks in any way she had this strong feeling that the place was covered with ashes and somehow the photograph was related to the attacks.

A Local Website

Universal Hublearned was a local website one of whose staff member got to know about Elizabeth’s annual tradition. They saw it on her profile that every year she was sharing the same photograph and requested people to spread the word. That was the moment when things started to change.

Everyone Noticed

Once the website posted Elizabeth’s story with the photograph, it finally got the exposure it actually needed. Her post was shared further by more than 68,800 people on Twitter. When a Reddit user named Scott Kelly noticed the story she shared the photo as a thread that got more than 1,000 replies overnight. So far, she didn’t find the right person.