By Barry Williams, Leonard Greene
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — She has been dead for many years now, not from anything related to 9/11, because they saved her that day.
But to hear the firefighters who pulled Josephine Harris from the World Trade Center rubble on Sept. 11, 2001 tell it, she was the one who saved them.
All six of them.
“We considered Josephine our guardian angel,” said Sal D’Agostino, one of the six firefighters who crossed paths with Harris on Stairwell B.
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When the south tower collapsed that morning, Ladder Company 6 from Chinatown got the order to pull out of the north tower. On the 20th floor, they spotted a weary Harris, who had suffered an unrelated leg injury days earlier, and needed help getting down the stairs.
At about the eighth floor, the north tower collapsed on top of them.
What happened next is the stuff they make movies about. The stairwell they were on — Stairwell B — withstood the collapse, even as steel and concrete rained around them.
Had Harris been able to walk any faster, they reasoned, they all would have died.
”Without us, Josephine would not have made it. And we feel without Josephine we would have died,” D’Agostino said. “She slowed us down just enough.”
There were others, including firefighters, who passed them on the stairwell, who never made it out. Harris finally had to stop and rest, and told the others to go on without her. They didn’t.
It was then, D’Agostino said, that the building came down around them.
”If she doesn’t do that, we would have been dead,” he said. “We were buried, and we were trapped for over five hours.”
On Tuesday, with the 25th anniversary approaching, Harris’ family returned a special FDNY jacket that members of Ladder 6 gave to Josephine in appreciation years ago, and thanked the firefighters who survived with her that day and the department for always being part of their lives.
The jacket is now in a frame and will be put on display for all to see.
“Generation after generation can see and know what the jacket meant,” her sister, Thelma Johnson, said. “It was a significant part of our world after she passed away. With the jacket, we thought the public could see it, the school kids could see it.”
Johnson said that after the towers collapsed, hours passed before she was able to reach Harris.
“I’m calling my sister. I got no response,” Johnson said. “And I kept calling. Finally she picked up and she said, ‘I’m in the hospital. I’m not doing too well.’ But as the story went, she was stuck in that building, and the six guys who were there. They saved each other.”
On the fifth anniversary of the attack, in 2006, the History Channel aired a documentary about the rescue called, “The Miracle of Stairway B.”
A week before she died, Harris appeared with the firefighters in a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
Harris briefly returned to work after 9/11, but found it difficult because of an injury that day. She stopped working after her job was moved to Newark, her family said. Harris, a widow, eked out a living on disability assistance.
When Harris, 69, suffered a heart attack in her Bushwick home and died in 2011, her six saviors — D’Agostino, Matt Komorowski, Mike Meldrum, Bill Butler and Tommy Falco and John Jonas — were called back into duty, this time as pallbearers, lifting her again when she could walk no more.
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