The photo shows Cooper, who was 60 at the time, with a manila envelope tucked under his left arm. He and several other men were in a desperate sprint as a wall of debris from the collapsing tower looms behind them.
Cooper ducked to safety into a nearby subway station.
"Every year on 9/11, he would go looking for the magazine and say, 'Look, it's here again," said Jessica Rashes, Cooper's 27-year-old daughter. "He would bring it to family barbecues, parties, anywhere he could show it off."
Susan Gould, a longtime friend, said Cooper was proud of the photo, purchasing multiple copies of Time and handing them out "like a calling card." She said Cooper shrank a copy of the photo, laminated it, and kept it in his wallet.
"Stephen was a character," Gould said.
Suzanne Plunkett, the Associated Press photographer who snapped the shot, wrote that she's been in touch with two of the people in the photo, but Cooper was not among them.
"It is a shame I was never aware of the identity of Mr Cooper," Plunkett wrote in an email to The Palm Beach Post after his death.
- AP