Josephine Harris was struggling to escape the World Trade Center when six firefighters stopped to help her.
Years later, those men would insist it was her who saved them.
Despite an injury from a car crash months earlier, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, the 59-year-old bookkeeper from Brooklyn made it down 50 flights.
Exhausted and struggling to go on, she was spotted by six firefighters from FDNY Ladder Company 6 on the 20th floor.
They were on their way back down after being ordered to evacuate following the collapse of the South Tower.
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Firefighter Tommy Falco asked Captain Jay Jonas what they should do. ‘We cannot leave her behind,’ Jonas replied.
They continued their descent at her pace, carefully guiding Harris down Stairwell B, near the centre of the tower.
Within minutes, the ground started shaking as the tower around them collapsed in a cloud of crumbling concrete and twisting steel.
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But against all odds, the bookkeeper survived along with all six firefighters.
‘We considered Josephine our guardian angel’, firefighter Sal D’Agostino said. They insisted that while they had saved her life, she had also saved theirs.
Harris was a widow and grandmother who had worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for six months before the attacks.
Just months earlier, she had been struck by a car and suffered injuries to her leg and back. True to her determined nature, she signed herself out of hospital the same day and returned to normal life wearing a leg brace.
On the morning of September 11, Harris was at work on the 73rd floor when the plane crashed into the building at 8.46am.
Like thousands of other people, she immediately started making her way down the stairs.
9/11: 25 years later
It has been 25 years since the horrific 9/11 attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in New York City, claiming the lives of thousands.
Follow Metro’s coverage of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 as we look back on the tragic attack, those who died, survived, and those who helped:
- A tribute to all the victims who died on 9/11
- Who was the ‘red bandana man’ who saved dozens of people on 9/11?
- Remembering the children who lost their lives on the fateful 9/11 flights
- A look back at how the 9/11 attack unfolded
Coming the other way were Captain Jay Jonas, Sal D’Agostino, Matt Komorowski, Mike Meldrum, Bill Butler and Tommy Falco, heading towards the impact zone.
It was when they reached the 27th floor that the South Tower collapsed at 9.59am, prompting the evacuation.
Heading down, they found Harris, barely able to continue because of her leg injury.
Bill Butler put her arm over his shoulder and helped support her weight as they trudged towards the exit.
Eventually, on the lower floors, they stopped to rest between the second and fourth floors when Harris, exhausted, told them to go on without her.
Moments later, at 10.28am, the tower collapsed, but the staircase where they stopped was the only part of the structure that remained intact.
Jonas later said the North Tower ‘peeled away like a banana’ around the staircase.
There they were trapped for five hours before managing to attract the attention of rescuers – it became known as the Miracle of Stairwell B.
Harris returned to work after 9/11, but eventually had to give that up because of her injuries and lived in Brooklyn on disability support.
Following her death at the age of 69, Captain Jonas said it felt like losing a member of the family.
The friendship between the bookkeeper and the firefighters lasted for the rest of Harris’s life.
Members of Ladder 6 presented her with an FDNY jacket embroidered with the words ‘Our Guardian Angel’ and regularly appeared alongside her at events marking the attacks.
When Harris died of a heart attack in 2011, aged 69, the six firefighters who had carried her down Stairwell B were called upon one final time.
They served as her pallbearers at her funeral.
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