Josephine Harris was 59 years old and worked as an accountant for the Port Authority. On September 11, 2001, she was on the 73rd floor of the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building at 8:46 in the morning.
She descended fifty floors with one leg injured in a recent car accident. In Stairwell B, she could go no farther.
That was where six firefighters from Ladder 6 found her: Jay Jonas, Sal D’Agostino, Matt Komorowski, Bill Butler, Mike Meldrum, and Tommy Falco. They were climbing with 45 kilos of gear on their backs, in the middle of a rescue operation. They could have kept going. They didn’t.
They stayed with her. They carried her, supported her, and lost precious minutes doing so.
At 10:28, the North Tower collapsed completely. All seven were trapped under the rubble for more than five hours, in a section of Stairwell B that, against all logic, did not collapse.
Others who were farther ahead in that same stairwell did not survive. They did.
The minutes they lost saving Josephine were, in the end, what kept them alive.
Two weeks later, they gave her a green FDNY jacket embroidered with a phrase: “Josephine Our Guardian Angel”. Years later, one of them named his newborn daughter Josephine.
Harris died in 2011. The same six firefighters carried her coffin.
On September 1, 2026, four of them met with Thelma, Josephine’s sister, at the Canal Street firehouse. They held the jacket in their hands again, twenty-five years later, to hang it there forever.
Sometimes stopping to help does not delay the rescue. It is the rescue.
