A moment in time: AP journalists remember Diana's death

LONDON (AP) — It was a warm Saturday evening and a group of journalists had gathered at a Paris restaurant to enjoy the last weekend of summer. At sometime past midnight, phones around the table began to ring — seemingly all at once — as news desks contacted reporters and photographers to alert them that Princess Diana’s car had crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.

Here’s how the news of Diana's death unfolded in the early hours of Aug. 31, 1997, and the days that followed as told by journalists who covered the story for The Associated Press.

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Jocelyn Noveck, then Associated Press news editor in Paris:

“We were paying the bill and all of a sudden there was this cacophony of mobile phones going off. The first one that went off was a British reporter's, a British cameraman, and he just got up and started running. And the rest of us called out, `What happened?’ And he just said, `The Princess of Wales! Crash!’ And then kept running."

“The first thought there was oh, maybe one of the boats that go up and down the Seine, the Bateaux Mouches, maybe one of them is called the Princess of Wales and it crashed into the banks of the river. That sounded like a digestible story to imagine. But, of course, soon we realized that Diana had been in a car, in a limousine … the Mercedes had crashed.”

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Stuart McAlister, former Associated Press cameraman in Paris:

“I got down to the tunnel and it was chaos, absolute chaos. There were late-night revelers and tourists who, of course, were walking at that time of night to go back to their hotels. They were on top of the Pont de l’Alma looking down. They couldn’t see anything because they were on the top of the bridge. … The police were doing what they could to keep people back. Of course, having a press pass, I just jumped into the...