Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

12 hours ago

Before they started down, Chief Jay Jonas of FDNY Ladder 6 stopped to shake hands with a firefighter from Rescue Company 1, the two of them hoping they would see each other again. They never did. It was the kind of small moment that only means everything in hindsight.

Josephine Harris was a bookkeeper for the Port Authority. On September 11, she had already walked down dozens of flights inside the North Tower on a badly injured leg, and by the time the men of Ladder 6 reached her around the 20th floor, she had nothing left and could not go on.

They would not leave her. The firefighters lifted her up and carried her down with them, slow and heavy work, one floor at a time. At 10:28 that morning, the North Tower collapsed around them. When the roar finally stopped and the dust began to settle, the stretch of Stairwell B where they were had somehow held. Fourteen people walked out of it alive, the firefighters, a Port Authority police officer, and Josephine, none of them seriously hurt.

Afterward, the men understood what had happened. If Josephine hadn't slowed them down, they would have been in the lobby when the building fell, and none of them would have survived. They started calling her their guardian angel. They stayed close to her for the rest of her life, and years later, when she passed away, the firefighters of Ladder 6 served as her pallbearers.

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Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

13 hours ago

Moira Smith was a New York City police officer, a thirteen-year veteran of the 13th Precinct, and the mother of a two-year-old daughter. When the towers were hit, she was among the very first officers to reach them.

There is a photograph of her that morning, guiding a badly injured, dust-covered man away from the building, one hand on him, steering him toward help. It would turn out to be the last picture ever taken of her. After she got him to safety, she went back in. Survivors would later describe her standing in a stairwell with a flashlight, telling people not to look, just to keep moving, keeping them calm as she pointed the way out. She kept going back for more.

She was last seen helping others on the lower floors when the South Tower came down. She was the only woman among the NYPD officers who died that day. Her remains and her shield were recovered the following spring, and she was awarded the department's Medal of Honor. The little girl she left behind grew up hearing, from the people her mother saved, exactly who Moira Smith was.

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