On March 30 2008, Pran died from pancreatic cancer. He is survived by four children from his first marriage, a sister, and eight grandchildren.

The New York Times arranged for him to move to New York. Pran reunited with his family and was hired by the newspaper as a photographer. The White House honored him and he became the goodwill ambassador to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 1986, he became an official U.S citizen. His story became a 1984 movie The Killing Fields. Dith was portrayed by Haing S. Nagor, the movie recieved three Acedemy Awards. He founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to insure that the Cambodian holocaust would not be forgotten. He served, alongside Nagor, as a member of the Cambodia Documentation Commission, which was a group committed to seeing Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, tried for justice.

In the early 1970s, Cambodia slipped into civil war, the Khmer Rouge grew more threatening.  In 1972, Dith met Schanberg, and soon began working for the New York Timesreporter exclusively. He developed a sense for what would make a good story and taught himself photography. One of the biggest stories he and Schanberg covered was to the site where 400 civilians had been injured or killed by an American bomber that had misidentified the village as a military target. By spring of 1975, it was increasingly obvious that the Khmer Rouge would take over Phnom Penh. Many Cambodians fled, among them Dith's wife and four children, whom he sent to the United States, but Dith stayed back to get the story of how people were getting out. Dith and Schanberg, along with their driver and two other foreign journalists, were confronted by Khmer Rouge soldiers. Dith argued with the soldiers  and he was taken though he had the chance to leave. Though Schanberg had at first thought that Dith was pleading for his own life, he had actually been pleading to stay with the foreign journalists, knowing he was their only chance at survival.To avoid  execution, Pran hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant. For the next four and a half years, Dith worked in the fields or at menial jobs. Because the rationed food could not support them, Dith and other villagers ate rats, snakes, and ox blood to keep from starving. When Pran went back to his home town in 1978, he found that 50 of him family memebers had been killed and taken to a place he reffered to as "the killing fields". Dith fled for Thailand, avoiding landmines as well as the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese soldiers that stood in his way. When he reached the refugee camp, he was treated for malaria, and he found a way to contact his friend, Schanberg, who arrived three days later.

Dith Pran was born on  September 24, 1942 in Siem Reap, Cambodia. His father was a public-works official. Dith learned French at school and taught himself to speak English. After finishing school, Dith became an interpreter and translator for the U.S. military, tourists, and visiting film companies. He also found work as a hotel receptionist near Angkor Wat. But as violence in Vietnam escalated, tourism decreased, and the American bombing of Cambodia forced Dith and his family to move to the capital, Phnom Penh. Here, Dith extended his translation services to foreign journalists, and soon became a favorite. He was often able to obtain hotel rooms, bribe teletype operators to make sure that the journalists met their deadlines, and secure access to parts of Cambodia normally off limits to foreign journalists.