This week, thrilling video was released showing a trio of men diving off 1 World Trade Center in a 1,368-foot BASE jump last September. Those men—James Brady, 32; Andrew Rossig, 33; Marko Markovich, 26; and lookout Kyle Hartwell, 29—all turned themselves into police. It turns out that Brady, who wore the GoPro helmet from which the video below was taken, was one of the ironworkers who helped build 1 WTC. He also was one of four workers to help Time Magazine take a breathtaking 360-degree interactive photo from 1 WTC’s spire—and two days after that, on September 30th, he performed the BASE jump. And now he's being talked about like a folk hero.

Because of his involvement in the 360-degree photo, Brady was interviewed by Time reporter Josh Sanburn last year about constructing WTC. Sanburn described him as "intense, physically-imposing, more inclined to adventure than introspection." "Whenever I see it, I’m like, ‘F—in’ A, man, the thing’s f—in’ huge!” Brady told him at the time. "And we were up there."

Although he was still working on 1 WTC as an employee of DCM Erectors when he made the jump, Brady’s lawyer Andrew Mancilla maintains that Brady didn’t use his security ID to reach the roof but instead slipped through a hole in the fence surrounding the construction zone (the same hole that a 16-year-old was allegedly able to sneak through to get to the top last week). Brady quit working on the WTC site around Thanksgiving for reasons allegedly unrelated to the jump.

"A lot of your ironworkers are guys that were adventurous kids. These are the guys that are skiing 100 miles an hour. These are the guys that are jumping out of airplanes," Kevin Murphy, the supervisor of 1 WTC’s ironworkers, told Time. After Brady helped Time get the 360-degree photo, he was asked what was next for him and his fellow ironworkers: "We really don’t know what we’ll be doing," Brady responded. "But I don’t know what could top this.”

All four men, who turned themselves in, have been charged with reckless endangerment, burglary and BASE jumping for the incident. The Daily Beast has more details about how police eventually caught up with the four men, using surveillance cameras from nearby buildings in the area to eventually connect a getaway car with Brady, who had previously been arrested (along with Rossig) in December of 2012 for attempting to jump off a 33-storey tower in Co-Op City in the Bronx.

But cops they talked to think that Brady and his cohorts will go down as folk heroes, a la legendary tightrope walker Philippe Petit:

Now that the towers have been toppled and the single spire has risen in their place there can be no more tightrope walks. But the cop figures that Brady and his friends could be viewed as Petit’s successors.

“The modern day version,” the cop said. “The only thing that paints them in a negative light is that in the post 9/11 world everybody looks at them as potential terrorism.”

If there was poetry in Petit’s walk, there is all the more in Brady’s jump. He is already widely considered to be one of the very best ironworkers. He is now sure to become a folk hero among his brethren on high steel. He is the one who parachuted off a tower that he helped to build, the daredevil who had previously faced the on-the-job dangers that all of his trade routinely face to little public notice.