'Guardian angel': The slowest woman in Stairwell B

On September 11, 2001, Josephine Harris was a 59-year-old bookkeeper for the Port Authority, working on the 73rd floor of the North Tower. She'd been hit by a car a few months earlier and was still getting around on a leg brace.

After American Airlines Flight 11 hit the tower at 8:46 a.m., she made it more than 50 floors down on her own before her legs gave out.

They started calling her their 'guardian angel' and meant it literally.

Ladder Company 6, led by Captain Jay Jonas, had gone up to help with the evacuation. At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed, and Jonas ordered his men back down. Around the 19th floor, they found Harris — barely able to stand. Instead of continuing past her, they stopped, picked her up, and carried her the rest of the way.

It was slow going, too slow, in a way that would end up mattering more than anyone there could have known. By the fourth floor, Harris couldn't take another step, and the group stopped with her.

That's where they still were, 29 minutes later, when the North Tower came down at 10:28 a.m. — with Jonas' men still carrying a woman who couldn't carry herself.

The small enclosed shaft they were standing in, Stairwell B, held while everything around it fell. Jonas later described the noise and motion in almost violent detail — floors slamming into floors, steel twisting, the ground bucking beneath them — and then, after roughly 12 seconds, it stopped.

"The tower came down like a peeling banana," Jonas told USA Today, according to Fox News, "and it peeled around us."

Port Authority K-9 Officer David Lim, also trapped there, came to in the silence afterward and started coughing. "My first thought in my head is, 'Well, dead men don't cough, so that means I'm still alive,'" he said.

Fourteen people walked away from that spot — firefighters, a police officer, and Josephine Harris — with no life-threatening injuries, buried under rubble that had flattened almost everything else.

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Chris Hondros/Getty Images

They were the only survivors found in any stairwell in the North Tower that day. Every other stairwell came down with everyone in it.

The leading theory for why they survived points to location: Stairwell B ran through the geographic center of the tower's core, shielded on all sides by the building itself.

The firefighters never forgot what Harris' slow pace had actually done for them. Had she been able to walk normally, the math is simple and unbearable — they'd have reached the lobby well before 10:28, with nothing left standing to shelter them.

They started calling her their "guardian angel" and meant it literally: A woman who couldn't save herself ended up being the reason an entire company made it home.

Jonas and his men stayed close to Harris for the rest of her life. She died a decade later, in 2011, still in touch with the men she'd unknowingly saved by needing them to slow down.

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