Photographer captures rescue of pregnant woman from Brooklyn rubble

Woman freed from the debris had been trapped nearly 2½ hours

Freelance photographer Ryan Murphy was on assignment for The Associated Press in the Bronx when a report of a collapsed building in Brooklyn reached him. He rode his motorcycle to the scene and took up a position on the roof of a building overlooking the site, from which he photographed a woman being lifted from the rubble after nearly 2½ hours beneath the debris.

Police forced Murphy away from the collapsed building when he first arrived. At ground level he could see firefighters working on ladders but could not see down into the excavation site where the rescue was under way, and he quickly concluded that he needed a higher vantage point. He began scanning for rooftops. A woman offered him the use of her backyard, which backed onto the collapse site; standing on a stool with his camera raised above his head, Murphy said, he immediately grasped the magnitude of the damage. People on an adjacent rooftop then invited him up.

From that roof, Murphy said, his long lens showed firefighters swarming the debris pile and beginning to cluster in one spot, some carrying power saws and a stretcher.

“I’m like, ‘They’re going to pull someone out,’” he said in a phone interview Friday.

Murphy kept his lens fixed on that spot for roughly 30 minutes as firefighters cut a hole into the wreckage. Rescuers then moved the stretcher in, a woman’s head appeared and she was talking, and when they placed her on the stretcher Murphy noticed she was pregnant.

The woman was the first person Murphy had seen pulled from the rubble. He waited until he had a clear shot of the rescue, messaged his AP editor that he was filing a photo showing a body coming out, and sent it.

Murphy said he was skeptical anyone could have survived. The three-story building had fallen entirely into a heap at the bottom of a deep construction pit.

“‘If anyone were to survive this, it would be a miracle,’” he recalled thinking. Then the woman came out and was moving — and she was pregnant.

“The combination of those things just completely blew me away,” he said. “I was amazed. And it was this moment of hope and resilience in a really devastating situation.”