What happens when a story of survival surpasses survival itself? Twenty-five years after 9/11, the unlikely story of Josephine Harris and the firefighters of Ladder Company 6 still provides an answer.
In early 2011, a crowd gathered outside St. Joseph’s Catholic Church for a unique New York City “firefighter’s funeral.” Firetrucks lined the street. An honor guard and several local officials stood at solemn attention as a bagpiper played the haunting notes of “Amazing Grace. And six members of the New York Fire Department hoisted the casket onto their shoulders and carried it inside the church, the grieving family following closely behind.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar scene for New York residents, who had seen too many firefighters buried in the days and years after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.
But the person being honored that day was not a firefighter. She had never spent hours drilling on hose stretches or burst into a burning house or carried 110 pounds of gear while racing up a flight of stairs.
Josephine Harris was just an ordinary person.
But she was a hero nonetheless, especially to the six men carrying her casket. To their telling, she had once saved their lives.
Their intertwined story is just one of thousands that make up the collective memory of the smoke-filled, chaotic hours of September 11, 2001, but the miraculous survival of Ladder Company Six and Josephine Harris stands out as one of the very few that offered a happy ending and a sense of hope on a day otherwise filled with unimaginable loss.
Their story, eventually known as “The Miracle of Stairway B,” was recounted in various media outlets in the weeks and years afterwards, including Dateline NBC, the History Channel, and the Oprah Winfrey Show. But their story deserves a retelling now, and not just because it’s the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. It deserves to be told again — and again — because it is a profound and much-needed reminder of what ultimately binds us together as human beings.
Greenwich Village, November 1987
Like the best stories, the story of Ladder Company 6 and Josephine Harris actually has a prologue, one that would begin the process of weaving seemingly unrelated threads of tragedy and pain into a blanket of grace nearly 25 years later.
This part of the story took place not far from the World Trade Center on Veterans Day 1987. That’s when another building, this one a mere five-stories tall and undergoing renovation, suddenly collapsed, trapping several people inside, including a 13-month-old boy.
The child’s young father, Peter DeLuca, a funeral home director, had been returning from conducting a funeral a few blocks away when he saw the building start shaking. He raced inside just as the building crumbled, floor by floor. A neighbor managed to pull out DeLuca, who was covered with stone dust, cut up, and screaming, “My baby’s in there! My wife’s in there! Help me!”
Someone called 911, and Peter and several other people climbed onto the rubble in hopes of hearing voices. An army of First Responders soon showed up. “Working mostly with bare hands for more than three hours in a sleetstorm, fire, police and emergency workers carefully extricated the residents from the tons of rubble,” the New York Times later reported.
Sadly, the baby would later die of his injuries, but his mother, who despite suffering critical injuries, survived. Police would continue searching the rubble late into the night to try to locate photos and mementoes of the child for the bereaved family.
They couldn’t have known then that their extra dedication that night would one day reap a different kind of support for those affected by another disaster.
DeLuca, despite his catastrophic loss, had been moved by the bravery and heroism of the firefighters and other emergency responders who had worked so hard to try to save his family. And in the years that followed, he would relocate his funeral home to Beecker Street in Manhattan in the shadow of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, DeLuca would step up to help arrange as many funerals as he could for its victims, including some of the 343 firefighters and 60 police officers who would perish when the Twin Towers fell.
Manhattan, September 11, 2001
The first airliner hit the first World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. Like other fire units, Ladder Company 6, stationed in nearby Chinatown, responded immediately. The team was made up of six men, all native New Yorkers, with strong experience and family ties to the New York Fire Department (NYFD). By their nature and training, they raced to the scene, fully intent on fighting the fire now furiously raging through the top floors of the North Tower. But they had no idea the calamity they were about to face.
As they started pulling their gear from the truck, the six-man crew had to avoid flaming debris and falling computer monitors; more horrifically, people were now jumping from the highest floors to escape. “You realized the utter desperation that these people must be going through,” recalled Jim McGlynn, a firefighter with a different unit who joined up with Ladder 6 that morning.
Still not knowing what exactly was happening or the impossibility of the task before them, Capt. Jay Jonas, a 20-year veteran, received his orders to head to the 80th floor of the North Tower. He led his small team into Stairway B in the center of the building. The stairs were surprisingly narrow, and as they started up, a single-file line of workers heading down passed the firefighters on the right side. Many were suffering from burns or other injuries.
“I kept telling people, ‘Just keep moving, just keep moving, just keep moving,’” recalled Jonas. “And the people kept saying, ‘God bless you, God bless you,’ as we were going up. You know, ‘Be careful. God bless you.’”
Stopping every three or four floors for rest, the small team of firefighters continued to climb, trying desperately to reach the fire without depleting all of their energy. Somewhere along the way, they passed Josephine Harris, who was slowly working her way down the stairs.
Harris, a widow and a grandmother, was a bookkeeper for the Port Authority. By all accounts, she was strong-willed, fiercely independent, and tough. That summer, she’d been hit by a car on the streets of Manhattan, landing on her side and badly injuring her leg. “Not my time,” she thought to herself, so she walked out of the ER, put a brace on, and “went on about my business.”
On September 11, Harris was just a few days shy of her 60th birthday. Despite waking with a sour stomach, she dutifully headed to her office on the 73rd floor of the North Tower and started her workday.
The plane hit not long after she arrived, shaking the building violently. “It just began to rock,” she described. “Why won’t it stop rocking?”
Still, Harris didn’t panic. She mentally clicked through the evacuation drills she’d taken part in, picked up her pocketbook, and headed to Stairway B, the only stairway that went directly to the ground-floor lobby. Along with thousands of others, she started navigating her way down.
It wasn’t long, though, before her bad leg began hurting to the point that it was giving out. Her office manager stepped in at some point to support her, and painfully, slowly, but together, they made it down more than 50 levels. By the 15th floor, she was making little progress, forced to two-step it on each stair, and rapidly falling behind the other evacuees.
She stopped, unable to go on.
At this point, the men of Ladder 6 had just reached the 31st floor. But then came a loud rumble. Suddenly, the building “shook so violently that you couldn’t stand up. Everybody hit the floor,” McGlynn recalled. Most of the firefighters thought a piece of the building’s top had broken off and hit the side on the way down, but Captain Jonas knew differently: The South Tower had collapsed.
He quickly ordered his men to reverse course and head back down the stairs. “I just looked at my guys and said, ‘Okay, it’s time to pull the plug. Time to go.’ If that one can go, this one can go.”
They raced back down until they reached the 15th floor, where they finally ran into the exhausted Josephine. “Every fiber of my being was telling me, ‘Keep going!’” Jonas remembers. “You’re wasting time. Get out of this building.’” He wanted to save his men, save himself. They had wives, children, parents, a future.
But there was no way he was going to leave Josephine behind. He motioned for the office worker who had been helping Josephine to head on alone, and he ordered Bill Butler, the strongest man on his team, to take over. “Grab her,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They didn’t know it then, but by stopping to save Josephine, they would end up saving their own lives.
Butler put his arm around Harris, “lifting and guiding” her down the stairs. She continued to struggle, but he encouraged her and so they kept going, slowly, excruciating step by excruciating step. Until they reached the fourth floor. There, Josephine’s legs finally gave out, and she fell down. She couldn’t get up and she couldn’t go on, she insisted. Worse, she didn’t want to. “I told them to leave me,” she recalled.
They refused. Instead, Jonas went looking for a chair so she could be more easily carried the rest of the way, but when he couldn’t find one, he started running back. He was a couple of feet away from the stairway entrance when he heard a rumble — the same hellish sound he’d heard just 29 minutes prior. He dove headfirst into the stairway as the North Tower began folding like an accordion, floor by floor. Loud metal clanging and violent vibrations overwhelmed the narrow space. “We were bouncing up and down off the floor,” Jonas recalled.
What’s more, the sudden compression of air within the falling building caused a powerful wind to sweep into the stairway, picking up firefighter Matt Kamorowski and casting him down two flights of stairs. Concrete dust and ash filled their eyes, ears, and mouths and everyone began coughing and gagging.
Firefighter Sal D’Agostino tried to grab the metal frame of a doorway but was blown backwards. He righted himself, crawled to the doorway, and just laid there.” He thought, “This is it. And I said a prayer.”
They all thought of their families. They waited to get hit by something big. They asked God to make the end quick and painless.
Then suddenly, everything went still.
Unable to wrap his mind about what had just happened and surrounded by darkness, Captain Jonas tried to get his bearings by taking a roll call of his men. One by one, they answered. Miraculously, everyone was alive and largely uninjured, including Josephine. She was laying underneath a large piece of sheet rock in front of Butler and hanging tightly onto his foot.
They had somehow survived but they weren’t free. They were trapped, encapsulated, as one firefighter described it, and no one outside knew it. That’s something a New York City firefighter doesn’t experience very often, Jonas later admitted. “Usually you’re on the other side of the equation — somebody’s in trouble, you go get them.”
He realized that for the first time in his long career, he would have to send out his own distress call. He climbed to the top with his radio and started transmitting, “Mayday, mayday, mayday!”
A response: “Go with the mayday. Go ahead.”
Jonas identified his unit and his location: “Ladder 6, Tower One, Stairwell B.”
On the other end, fireman Cliff Stapner, a long-time friend, excitedly answered: “Captain Jay Jonas, this is Cliff. We’re coming for you, brother! We’re coming for you!”
Finding Stairway B wouldn’t be easy. There were no landmarks anymore, just a massive, 16-acre debris field marking what remained of the North Tower. It would take hours for rescuers to locate the group and even more time to help them navigate a treacherous escape route across steep hills and deep canyons of twisted steel beams, concrete blocks, wires, broken glass, and other building material.
Josephine, still unable to walk, was placed in a rescue basket for the journey. Bill Butler and Sal D’Agostino stood at her side, reassuring her and giving pointed instructions to those who would carry her to safety. “Her name is Josephine,” D’Agostino informed them.
Chinatown, September 2001
Two weeks later, Josephine traveled to the Ladder 6 firehouse in Chinatown, a visit arranged and filmed by Dateline NBC and anchor Stone Phillips for a feature detailing the group’s survival. The reunion was emotional, marked by tears and hugs, recollections, and everyone repeatedly thanking each other.
The men of Ladder Company Six also had a surprise for Josephine: They presented her with an official green NYFD jacket. On it, they had inscribed her name and a title: “Our Guardian Angel.”
She cried on receiving it, but she also protested. She had done nothing, she insisted. The firemen had rescued her. They had cared for her, protected her, comforted her, saved her life.
But that’s not how they saw it. “If she wasn’t there, we would have been a little faster and we would not have made it,” Jonas stated.
Physics and engineering science backed up the firefighters’ contention. It turns out that being located in a narrow center stairway near the very bottom of a 110-story building was not the worst but the absolute best place they could have been that day.
A study later conducted found that because the building’s exterior had fallen faster than the inside, much of the debris had fallen out and away from the core. Moreover, a mechanical room located on the fifth floor of the North Tower had been reinforced with an extra layer of concrete, which helped to further absorb the blow and redirect debris out and away.
As a result, the only part of Stairway B left intact that day was between floors 2 and 4 — the exact spot where Harris and her rescuers happened to be when the tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m.
In the end, they agreed that God had put them in just the right place to save each other, and this recognition, along with their shared trauma, helped forge an emotional bond that never broke.
The firefighters remained in regular touch with Josephine, checking in frequently and visiting often. When they all got together, they invited her. She got to know wives and children.
“She was happy when she was around us,” Jonas said, adding, “We had a very unique, shared experience….We survived that terrible day together, and we felt close to her and tried to include her in as many things as we could.”
Greenwich Village, January 2011
Josephine Harris was alone in the early morning hours of January 12, 2011, when she dialed 911. A local fire department in Brooklyn responded immediately, but this time they couldn’t save her. She had suffered a massive and fatal heart attack.
On hearing the news, Jonas said, “I kind of had the same feeling as if a relative had died. Right away, you start thinking about all the things you go through.”
Her sister, Thelma Johnson, didn’t have the funds to pay for her sister’s funeral, and Jonas and his team started trying to raise money to pay for it.
They didn’t know it then, but help was on the way.
Johnson got a call from Peter DeLuca, the funeral director who had long ago watched desperately as firefighters worked to try to rescue his own wife and son out of the rubble of a collapsed building. He told her that he admired Josephine and wanted to arrange and pay the entire cost of Josephine’s funeral.
When city fire chiefs, including Jay Jonas, heard about DeLuca’s gesture, they arranged to hold an official fireman’s funeral for Josephine, complete with honor guard, a firetruck, and as many attendees as possible. DeLuca had her steel casket outfitted with an embroidered interior showing a firefighter in full gear walking hand-in-hand with an angel.
Cardinal Egan Edward, the former archbishop of New York City, conducted the mass. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani came to pay his respects, along with top New York City fire officials.
The men of Ladder Company Six — Jay Jonas, Bill Butler, Sal D’Agostino, Matt Komorowski, Mike Meldrum, and Tommy Falco — served as her pallbearers, carrying their dear friend one final time.
The Real Miracle
Throughout this story there was no concern for race or political persuasion, sex or nationality, only the sanctity and the immeasurable value of human life, of our shared humanity.
These firefighters were willing to risk their lives for one woman, a woman who urged them to save themselves. It didn’t matter that she was black and they were white or that they were young and she was old, or that they were men and she was a woman. It mattered that they were human beings and their lives were at stake.
In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis writes of our shared humanity and the unbearable burden of the immortality of the human soul.
“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken….
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”
Every person bears the image of God, an image that will last into eternity in either Heaven or eternal damnation. And each action that we take, whether selfish or selfless, can help a person on their journey to one destination or the other. It doesn’t matter what our neighbor looks like or what their background is. It matters that they are human. That they can laugh with you at a gathering, that they can hold you in a crumbling stairwell, that they can carry you to your resting place, and that they can kneel beside you one day in everlasting worship of God.
In the end, the “miracle” that Josephine Harris and Ladder Team 6 experienced was bigger than physical survival. On a morning remembered for the worst of what human beings can do to one another, their story revealed something about the best of our shared humanity: that another life is worth slowing down for, worth sacrificing for, and worth refusing to leave behind.
And yet their story points beyond human goodness to the sovereignty of God, who in the midst of unimaginable chaos placed Josephine and a group of firefighters in precisely the place where they needed to be.
That is when a story of survival surpasses the survival itself.
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