On the morning of September 11, 2001, Aaron McLamb, then a 20-year-old volunteer at the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters, photographed a fire truck crossing the Brooklyn Bridge toward the burning World Trade Center towers. McLamb was working at a Brooklyn bookbinding factory when he witnessed the fire in the North Tower and used a 35 mm Canon Rebel 2000 camera to document the emergency response from a 10-story building.
The photograph captured Ladder 118, a tiller-style fire truck based at the Middagh Street firehouse in Brooklyn Heights. All six crew members aboard the vehicle—Lt. Joseph Agnello, Vernon Cherry, Scott Davidson, Leon Smith, Peter Vega, and Lt. Robert Regan—were killed later that morning. They were performing evacuations at the Marriott Hotel when the 110-story South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., burying the crew.
McLamb, an amateur photographer with an interest in firefighting, recalled spotting the truck as it traveled along Prospect Street and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Following the tower collapse, McLamb and his colleagues were instructed to close all windows due to a large dust cloud, which ended his photography for the day. He later walked home through at least an inch or two of dust, noting that office papers covered the ground in Brooklyn Heights.
For the families of the deceased and the surviving members of the Middagh Street firehouse, McLamb’s photograph documented the final moments of the crew. Retired firefighter John Sorrentino, who was off-duty on the day of the attacks, stated that the truck was identifiable by its tiller-style design and a specific exterior box mounted on the right side. The image appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News less than a month after the attacks under the headline "The last run of Ladder 118."
The Middagh Street firehouse continues to maintain a chalkboard listing the assignments of the six crew members from that morning. McLamb, who now lives in Leland, North Carolina, provided his negatives and prints to the firehouse a week after the attacks once it was confirmed that none of the crew members had survived. Eight total members from the firehouse died that day, including two others, Capt. Martin Egan and Lt. Robert Wallace, who were not on the Ladder 118 truck.