Somebody up there watches over me
Pavel Hlava was born on April 24, 1963, in Brno. He barely remembers his father, who died when the narrator was thirteen years old. In 1978, he went to Ostrava to train as a mining machine fitter. He worked as a miner. After his divorce, he decided to try his luck in the USA. His main motivation was to make enough money to buy a flat and settle permanently in Brno. He was living in New York, where he was working as a maintenance man. On September 11, 2001, he and his boss Mike Cohen were going down to Pennsylvania on a job. From the car, the narrator was filming the streets of Manhattan to test his new camcorder. At that precise moment, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre took place and the narrator happened to record it on his camcorder. Later he discovered that he was the only one who had captured both planes hitting the towers at the same time, which generated a lot of media attention. In 2003, he returned from the USA back to Brno.