Print edition: 
The morning after the deadly May 22 Joplin tornado that Wichita Eagle photojournalist Jaime Green survived and then documented, she was interviewed live on CNN.
The cable news network was showing one of the many images Green had captured that night in Joplin and paused on one that was particularly dramatic.
A woman and a young man in a red Pittsburg State University T-shirt were hunched over in the back of a pickup truck, holding on to two victims lying in the truck bed as it sped toward Freeman Hospital, one of Joplin's two main hospitals that survived the storm.
The victims' feet could be seen protruding from the back of the truck.
Green, who'd been shooting a wedding in Joplin and rode out the tornado under a carport at a medical office near the destroyed St. John's hospital, shot the picture out of her car window as she drove out of town that night.
"Do you have any idea what the condition is of any of those people you saw in that truck?" CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux asked Green during the interview.
"No, I don't," Green said, her voice cracking. "I don't."
Now she does.
On Tuesday, The Eagle received a call from William Sullivan, a doctor of internal medicine at Via Christi Hospital in Pittsburg — a Kansas town 35 miles northwest of Joplin.
It was his truck in the picture, he said, and he was behind the wheel. It was his wife, Patricia, a nurse practitioner, in the back of the truck, holding on to the injured victims.
The young man in the red T-shirt, he said, was Lucian Myers, a 20-year-old ROTC cadet at Pittsburg State who had just narrowly survived the storm himself.
In the days since the photo was published and transmitted all over the world, the Sullivans and Myers have been getting a lot of attention.
They met with Gov. Sam Brownback on Thursday to talk about their experiences. They were mentioned, though not by name, in President Obama's speech in Joplin on Sunday.
They were interviewed and Myers was photographed by People magazine for a soon-to-be-published story about Joplin tornado heroes.
Now, the trio say they feel forever linked by the photograph — and even more by the four hours they spent together that night, rescuing tornado victims from the rubble.
"It's kind of weird to think that he was here in Pittsburg all along, and I'm very sure I would never have met Dr. Sullivan any other way," Myers said during a phone interview from Pittsburg on Tuesday. "Just thinking that that had to happen for me to meet the Sullivans — it's odd. But I'm glad I know them."
The aftermath
Sullivan said he and his wife were enjoying a Sunday off shopping in Joplin. Suddenly, the sky turned dark. The Sullivans noticed what appeared to be a rain-wrapped tornado about 15 blocks in front of them.
As the tornado moved away from them, Sullivan, who treated victims of the 1991 Andover tornado as a first-year resident at St. Joseph hospital in Wichita, pointed his truck toward Joplin's St. John's hospital.
He found the hospital shredded, and he and Patricia began looking for people they could help.
They came upon the remnants of Joplin's Stained Glass Theatre, a Christian-based community playhouse that operated out of a building on St. John's campus. A group of actors, which included Myers, had just finished a production of the play "I Remember Mama" when the tornado hit.
The theater was flattened. The Sullivans came upon Myers, who was desperately trying to help his 16-year-old friend Malachi Murdock. Murdock was one of several people in the theater headed for the basement when the storm hit. But, like Myers, he never made it down. Murdock's face was crushed, and Myers — himself scraped up from falling cinder blocks and flying debris — didn't know what to do.
The Sullivans helped stabilize Murdock, and Myers helped them load him onto a torn-off door and into the back of the Sullivans' truck.
Myers and Patricia Sullivan stayed with Murdock in the bed of the truck while Sullivan drove. They delivered him to Freeman Hospital, where he had surgery for his crushed jaw. (Murdock is still there and expected to fully recover.)
Myers tried to call his mother in nearby Carl Junction, Mo., but phone service was down and he couldn't get through. His brother's car, which he'd driven to the play, was gone.
"The Sullivans had gathered up medical supplies and rubber gloves and gauze and medical tape" at the hospital, Myers said. "They asked me if I would go back out with them. I knew I couldn't call anyone, and I knew my brother's car was gone. I felt like that's all I could do. I could go help."
The trio headed back toward the theater but were detoured to nearby Greenbriar nursing home, where 11 people were killed.
For the next four hours, the Sullivans and Myers made at least five trips from the heart of the damage to Freeman, transporting more than a dozen of the most critical victims they encountered.
They estimate they were on their second trip to Freeman when Green passed them on the road and shot the picture that was transmitted all over the world.
Sullivan says that so far, everyone they transported that night has survived.
A photo, a record
Meanwhile, the picture — particularly Myers' red Pittsburg State shirt — was being noticed.
Green's photos, which also included a shot of devastated St. John's hospital, were among the first out of Joplin that night and were sent out all over the world.
Relatives sitting in an airport across the country saw the photo on television and recognized Myers, said his mother, Jamie. Although she didn't hear from her son until nearly 10 p.m. —and she couldn't watch television because the power was out due to the storm — Jamie had heard from several people that her son was fine and was "out helping people."
Public relations officials at Pittsburg State wanted to know who the people in the pictures were. In addition to Myers' T-shirt, the clearly visible license plates on the Sullivans' truck were personalized Pittsburg State tags.
Brownback's chief of staff also wanted to know who the heroes were. Once they were identified, Brownback invited them to meet with him at Pittsburg State so he could hear their story and thank them.
In the speech he delivered at a memorial service in Joplin on Sunday, Obama mentioned the image of the Sullivans and Myers, though he did not name them specifically.
"The world saw how Joplin responded," Obama said. "A university turned itself into a makeshift hospital. Some of you used your pickup trucks as ambulances, carrying the injured on doors that served as stretchers."
When it was too dark to work that night, the Sullivans took Myers to his parents then sped back to Pittsburg, where they worked through the night treating the more than 130 victims at Pittsburg's Via Christi.
In the following days, Sullivan nominated Myers, an ROTC cadet, for the U.S. Army Soldier's Medal, the highest award a soldier can receive for noncombat action.
The days since the tornado have been a blur for Myers, who's dealing with the news that three people at the theater, including the play's director, died.
Green's picture, which Myers said he's seen many times since the tornado, is meaningful to him, he said.
Not only does it serve as a record of what he survived, but it also serves as a record of how Joplin responded to the devastation.
He and the Sullivans weren't the only civilians loading victims onto torn-off doors and into pickups.
"People could see in the picture that people were helping out other people — just regular citizens who were coming together and putting people in the back of trucks and trying to get them help as soon as they could," he said.
"I was doing all I could do, and the picture kind of represents everybody else who was helping, too."
