Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

15 hours ago

Father Mychal Judge was 68 years old, a Franciscan friar in a brown robe who served as a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. He was the kind of priest who knew the homeless of the city by name, who kept folded bills in his pocket to hand out quietly, and who sat with AIDS patients in the years when many were afraid to touch them. He worked long days at fires and emergencies, not to lead them, but to be present for the men who did.

On the morning of September 11, he went to the towers with his firefighters. He was in the lobby of the North Tower, praying over the dead and dying and offering last rites, when the South Tower gave way and sent debris tearing through the space where he stood. He was killed there.

His was the first death formally recorded that day, and so he is remembered as Victim 0001. The photograph of firefighters carrying his body out of the rubble became one of the images the world would never forget. More than three thousand people came to his funeral, among them a former president. He had spent his life showing up for people in their worst moments, and he was doing exactly that when his own came.

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Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

20 hours ago

Rick Rescorla was 62 years old and had already lived several lifetimes of service. Born in England, he served in the British Army, then came to the United States, became a citizen, and fought as an Army officer in Vietnam, where he was decorated for his courage. By 2001 he was the head of security for Morgan Stanley, whose offices filled more than twenty floors of the South Tower.

He had survived the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and he never believed it was over. Certain the towers would be targeted again, he put the company's employees through evacuation drills so often that some of them grumbled about it. That preparation is what saved them.

When the first plane hit and an announcement told people to stay at their desks, Rescorla ignored it and began moving his people out. He walked the stairwells with a bullhorn, steadying everyone with his voice, even singing the songs he had once sung to his soldiers, so no one would panic. He led roughly 2,700 people to safety, nearly every Morgan Stanley employee and visitor in the building. Then he turned around and went back up to make sure no one had been left behind. He was still inside when the tower fell. His body was never recovered.

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Nacogdoches Hero Foundation

1 day ago

Orio Palmer was a battalion chief with the New York City Fire Department, 45 years old, with about twenty years on the job. At home in Valley Stream he was a husband and a father of three, a lighthearted man his family called the Music Man. He was also a marathon runner, one of the fittest men in the department.

When the South Tower was hit, Palmer was among the first to respond, and he did something almost no one else managed that morning: he got high into the building. Trained as an engineer who had once worked on elevators, he helped restore the tower's radio links and got an elevator running again, riding it up to around the 40th floor. From there he climbed, flight after flight, in heavy gear, steady the whole way. Near the 75th floor he found a fire marshal, Ron Bucca, who had come up on foot, and the two kept going together.

Palmer reached the 78th floor, the sky lobby where the plane had struck, a place investigators had long assumed no firefighter ever got to. Over the radio, his voice calm, he reported what he found and began calling for hose lines, still working the problem, still trying to reach the people above him. "We've got two isolated pockets of fire," he said, believing they could be put out. His last message came through at 9:58. A minute later, the tower fell. He was doing his job to the very end.

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