Twenty-five years after six FDNY firefighters refused to leave a collapsed bookkeeper behind in a stairwell of the World Trade Center's North Tower, her family walked into a Chinatown firehouse this week and handed back the jacket that had come to symbolize their survival. The green firehouse jacket, embroidered with the words “Josephine Our Guardian Angel,” had been kept by Josephine Harris's relatives for fifteen years after her death before they returned it to the members of Ladder Company 6 on Tuesday.
Harris, a 59-year-old bookkeeper for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was evacuating from the 73rd floor of the North Tower on September 11, 2001, when she collapsed from exhaustion and leg pain tied to a car accident she'd been in two weeks earlier, according to Police1. Rather than leave her, Ladder Company 6 members Captain Jay Jonas, Salvatore D'Agostino, Matt Komorowski, Bill Butler, Mike Meldrum, and Tommy Falco stayed with Harris in Stairwell B as she urged them to save themselves, according to CBS News. The 110-story tower came down around them at 10:28 a.m.
As FDNY recounted this week, the firefighters later noted that if they had been able to move faster with Harris, they likely would have reached the lobby or the street — areas that were completely destroyed when the tower fell. Instead, their slowed pace held them inside a section of Stairwell B that partially survived the collapse.
A Stairwell That Should Not Have Held
Only 20 people survived inside the World Trade Center towers as they came down that morning, and 16 of them were positioned in Stairwell B of the North Tower between the 1st and 22nd floors, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. That stretch of stairwell was the only core structural section of the tower left partially standing. Among those who made it out alive in that pocket was Port Authority Police Officer David Lim, a K-9 officer whose explosive-detection dog, Sirius, died in his basement kennel in the South Tower during the collapse, the agency's account notes.
FDNY's own retelling identifies six firefighters and one police officer who survived alongside Harris, all trapped beneath the rubble for hours before being freed. The bond formed in those hours did not end once everyone was pulled out. Harris remained close with members of Ladder Company 6 for the rest of her life, and one of the firefighters even named his firstborn child, born weighing 9 pounds, 11 ounces, after her, per the same CBS News account.
A Jacket, a Funeral, and a Debt of Gratitude Repaid
In the weeks after the attacks, the firehouse presented Harris with the custom green jacket that gave her the “Guardian Angel” nickname among the men she'd unknowingly helped save. She kept close ties to the company for years afterward, and when she died in January 2011 at age 69, it was in poverty — the result of financial hardship and bankruptcy she had endured before her death, according to Good News Network.
An East Village funeral director named Peter DeLuca stepped in and donated $13,000 in services so the FDNY could give her a full department funeral, the outlet reported. The blue steel coffin used for her service featured custom interior embroidery showing a firefighter in full gear walking hand-in-hand with an angel, a detail originally reported by the New York Times during her service. Members of Ladder Company 6 served as pallbearers, according to FDNY's account of the day.
Returned to the Firehouse, Preserved for the Public
On Tuesday, four of the six Ladder Company 6 members who had helped rescue Harris in 2001 accepted the jacket back from her family, FDNY said. The department described the returned jacket as a permanent reminder of a life saved, a bond shared, and a promise never to forget.
Pieces of that same story are already preserved for the public elsewhere. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum permanently displays artifacts from the Stairwell B rescue, including Officer Lim's gun belt, Sirius's leash, and a life-sized Polaroid portrait by photographer Joe McNally showing Harris wearing an FDNY cap and holding the embroidered jacket, according to the museum's account.
The rescue remains one of the most cited survival stories from September 11, but it sits alongside a far larger and grimmer toll. The initial attack killed 343 FDNY firefighters and 37 Port Authority police officers, and in the decades since, thousands more first responders have suffered or died from Ground Zero toxic exposure illnesses, Police1 reported. Both the FDNY and the Port Authority Police Department continue to add names to their memorial walls for those later deaths.
