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

By DANICA KIRKA
Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — It was a warm Saturday evening and 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 all at once. News desks were contacting reporters and photographers to alert them that Princess Diana’s car had crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. That’s how the news unfolded in the early hours of Aug. 31, 1997. What followed in the next hours and days was a story that shocked the world: Britain’s captivating princess, the woman who charmed the media, became a style icon and promoted unpopular causes like clearing land mines even as her royal marriage was disintegrating, was dead at age 36.