John Abruzzo was already at his desk on the 69th floor of the North Tower when the first plane hit.
He was a Port Authority accountant and a C5-6 quadriplegic.
His power wheelchair was how he moved through the world.
Most of his floor emptied fast.
Ten coworkers did not.
They lifted him out of his custom chair and into a lightweight evacuation chair the agency had bought after the 1993 bombing - the same attack that had already trapped Abruzzo in this building once before.
That first time it took six hours to get him down.
This time they took turns: two at the front, two at the back, sliding him down flight after flight, pivoting on every landing.
One person scouted ahead.
When they hit smoke they changed stairwells.
They even stopped at a Snapple machine.
Firefighters they passed offered to take him.
The group said no.
They would not leave him.
It took about 90 minutes to descend 69 floors.
They carried him over debris in the lobby and out through a broken window.
They were on the sidewalk roughly ten minutes before the North Tower fell.
The chair that brought him down is in the 9/11 Memorial Museum now.
The names of the people who stayed with him are not as widely known as they should be.
There was no speech.
No vote.
Just a group of office workers who looked at a man who could not take the stairs and decided his life was not someone else’s problem.
That is the story.
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