Award-winning CNN anchor Aaron Brown dead at 76

Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Aaron Brown, who anchored CNN's coverage of 9/11 and other important national and world events, passed away Sunday at age 76, his family announced.

They did not release his cause of death.

Brown began his broadcast journalism career with a local television station in Seattle before joining ABC News as its founding anchor of "World News Now" and "World News Tonight Saturday," CNN reported Tuesday.

He joined CNN in 2001 and anchored the NewsNight program from 2001 to 2005, during which he discussed and analyzed breaking news events of national and global importance.

Brown appeared on CNN while covering the 9/11 attacks from the rooftop of CNN's office near Madison Square Garden in Manhattan in 2001.

He reported on the event and its aftermath for 17 straight hours.

Fellow CNN reporter John Vause said Brown managed to state what most people were thinking as the day's events unfolded on 9/11.

"Good lord. There are no words," Vause recalled Brown saying when the World Trade Center's South Tower collapsed.

"It collapsed in a cascade of smoke and sparks," Brown said. "This is devastation. There are more than 50,000 people who normally go to work in the Trade Center buildings."

Television critic Howard Rosenberg likened Brown to a "French horn in an industry dominated by kazoos" a month after Brown's 9/11 broadcasts.

Brown "was at a terrible place at the right time," Rosenberg added.

Brown earned the Edward R. Murrow Award for his coverage of 9/11, but he maintained the first responders were the true heroes of 9/11.

"When that building fell, I understood better than any other point in my life ... what a hero meant," he said in 2016.

Brown's colleagues said he was a great storyteller and mentor who taught others how to become better reporters.

Brown attended the University of Minnesota after hosting a local radio talk show in Minneapolis and was a member of the Coast Guard Reserve.

He eventually won three Emmy Awards and several other honors for his work in broadcast journalism.

After leaving CNN, Brown was the Rhodes Chair in Public Policy and American Institutions at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.