'Dust Lady' Marcy Borders, featured in haunting 9/11 photo, dies of cancer

When the World Trade Center's South Tower collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, photographer Stan Honda was in Lower Manhattan, taking pictures of the scene.

"There was a giant roar, like a train, and between the buildings I could see huge clouds of smoke and dust billowing out," he recalled years later.

He ducked into a lobby, where "a police officer was pulling people into the entrance to get them out of the danger."

"A woman came in completely covered in gray dust," Honda recalled in 2011.

The woman turned out to be Marcy Borders, who had only recently begun working for Bank of America on the 81st floor of the North Tower when the first plane struck.

She was 28, and Honda's haunting photo of her - distributed by Agence France-Presse - became one of the most iconic images of that horrifying day.

The image - and, thus, Ms. Borders - became known as the "Dust Lady."

She became severely depressed and started smoking crack in the years after, she said, before finding "peace of mind" after the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden.

Then, sickness struck: She received a diagnosis of stomach cancer last August, according to the Jersey Journal.

On Monday, she died at age 42.

"My mom fought an amazing battle," Noelle Borders told the New York Post.

After her diagnosis, Ms. Borders wondered whether the disease was related to 9/11. "How do you go from being healthy to waking up the next day with cancer?" she told the Jersey Journal last year.

In 2011, Ms. Borders told the Telegraph she still had the skirt, blouse, and boots she was wearing on 9/11 - "still unwashed and coated in the dust of the Twin Towers," the British newspaper reported.

But when a reporter asked last year if she ever looked at Honda's photo, she said tried to avoid seeing herself as the "Dust Lady."

"I try to take myself from being a victim to being a survivor now," she said. "I don't want to be a victim anymore."