The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on Aug. 31, 1997, shook Britain and the world. The New York Times asked five journalists who covered the deadly car accident, which also killed Diana’s companion, Dodi al-Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul, to share their memories and reflections.

The Crash in Paris

Craig R. Whitney, then The Times’s Paris bureau chief, now retired and an author: I was awakened at home in Paris sometime after 12:35 a.m. by a call from the Foreign Desk. The wires had just fired out bulletins saying that Diana had been seriously injured in an automobile accident in Paris and that her escort, Dodi al-Fayed, and their driver had been killed. Could I verify the reports and file a story for the front page?

Warren Hoge, then The Times’s London bureau chief, now an adviser at the International Peace Institute: I was asleep in our London flat when I was awakened by a call from the Foreign Desk around 2 a.m. or so telling me there had been a car crash in Paris involving Princess Diana in which she had been seriously hurt and asking me to start writing her obituary in case she died.

I went to a back office, booted up my computer and began, with the help of what we then quaintly called the library staff in New York, assembling as many clips as I could of articles on Diana that I and other Times correspondents had written.

Whitney: The driver, a hotel employee, had headed west into the tunnel and then lost control and hit one of the concrete pillars dividing the eastbound and westbound lanes. The car crashed at high speed into the right wall, with so much force that the vehicle’s engine was driven into the front seat.

A police official confirmed that Diana was in the car, which he said was being “chased by photographers on motorcycles, which could have caused the accident.” Neither Diana nor the other three occupants had been wearing seatbelts. Grievously injured, Diana had been rushed to Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital on the other side of the Seine in southeast Paris, and soon died there, the French interior minister announced at 4 a.m.

Sarah Lyall, then a London correspondent for The Times, now a writer-at-large: I was at home in London when it happened and I remember there was a kind of delayed reaction in my head, the way there always is when you hear news that does not make sense.

My older daughter, Alice, was 1 ½, and so we were all up very early. “Dodi and Diana were in a car accident, and Dodi is dead,” my husband said. (Such was the ubiquitousness of Diana and her love life that everyone knew who Dodi was.) And then the news came in, that she had died as well.

I remember feeling very upset, even though I was not necessarily a big fan of Diana. She had inserted herself so thoroughly in the culture that it was as if we all knew her. She was always so alive. And so it seemed really shocking that she was dead.