The woman in the photograph barely looked recognizable.

Gray dust covered her hair.

It covered her face, her clothes, her arms.

Behind her, Lower Manhattan had almost disappeared into a cloud of smoke and debris.

A police car sat along the street.

Paper and wreckage covered the ground.

Beside her walked another woman, just as stunned and coated in dust.

Photographer Phil Penman saw them coming.

He raised his camera.

And pressed the shutter.

He could not have known that the woman walking toward him had begun that morning 87 floors above the streets of Manhattan.

Her name was Joanne “JoJo” Capestro.

And somehow, she was alive.

The photograph would eventually become part of the collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The Museum identifies the image as Joanne Capestro and a colleague fleeing the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2001, photographed by Phil Penman.

But the photograph only captured the end of one part of Joanne's story.

To understand what happened to the woman covered in dust, you have to go back to that morning.

Before the smoke.

Before the sirens.

Before anyone looking out over Manhattan understood that the world was about to change.

September 11, 2001 began as an ordinary workday for Joanne.

She wasn't even feeling well.

Joanne had bronchitis.

She could have stayed home.

Instead, she went to work.

She arrived carrying a cup of take-out tea and entered the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Her office was on the 87th floor.

Joanne worked as an executive assistant for the May Davis Group.

Thousands of people were doing exactly what she was doing that morning.

Taking elevators.

Answering phones.

Drinking coffee.

Sitting down at desks.

Looking at paperwork.

Thinking about meetings, lunch, deadlines and everything else that makes one Tuesday morning indistinguishable from another.

Joanne had no reason to believe she was walking into a building she would soon have to escape.

At 8:46 a.m., that changed.

American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower.

The impact zone was above Joanne's office.

From the 87th floor, she experienced what the 9/11 Memorial describes as something that felt like an earthquake.

Then came another unmistakable sign.

The smell of jet fuel.

Something catastrophic had happened above them.

And Joanne was still on the 87th floor.

There was no normal elevator ride down.

There was no simple walk through the lobby.

There were 87 floors between Joanne and the street.

She and several colleagues began looking for a way out.

They found an available stairwell.

And started down.

One floor.

Then another.

Then another.

Joanne had come to work wearing heels.

Decades later, those shoes would become part of how she remembered her escape. In a 2026 interview, she recalled people doubting she could make it out wearing them.

She did.

The staircase became the only thing that mattered.

Down.

Keep going.

Down.

Another floor.

Down.

The numbers were getting smaller.

But there were dozens still to go.

Joanne wasn't the only person descending.

Office workers were trying to evacuate from floors throughout the enormous building.

And as they moved downward toward safety, another group was moving in the opposite direction.

Firefighters and emergency personnel were climbing upward.

For the people escaping, the street represented survival.

For the rescuers climbing past them, the danger was somewhere above.

Joanne continued downward.

87.

88.

89.

The distance that had once been an elevator ride was now something she had to cross one stair at a time.

Later accounts reported that she covered the 87 flights in roughly 20–22 minutes.

Eventually, Joanne reached the bottom.

After 87 floors, she stepped outside.

She had escaped the North Tower.

For one brief moment, that might have seemed like the end of the story.

It wasn't.

Joanne was still near the World Trade Center when the South Tower began to collapse.

She heard a tremendous roar.

There was no time to understand what she was seeing.

She ran.

A massive cloud of dust and debris swept through the streets of Lower Manhattan.

Joanne disappeared into it.

When she emerged, the woman who had gone to work that morning was almost unrecognizable.

Her clothes were gray.

Her hair was gray.

Her face was covered in dust.

She kept moving away from the World Trade Center.

And somewhere along that street stood a photographer named Phil Penman.

He saw Joanne.

He lifted his camera.

Click.

Neither of them knew it yet.

But that single photograph would connect their lives for years.

And 17 years later, Joanne would ask the man behind that camera to photograph her one more time.

This time, she wouldn't be covered in gray.

She would be wearing white.

— End of Chapter 1 —

Next: Chapter 2 — 8:46 A.M.