The story is often reduced to a clean sentence: ten coworkers carried John Abruzzo down 69 flights of stairs.

The sentence is true.

It is also too small for what it contains.

Michael Ambrosio. Peter Bitwinski. Philip Caffrey. Richard Capriotti. Michael Curci. Michael Fabiano. Wilson Pacheco. Anthony Pecora. Gerald Simpkins. Peggy Zoch.

They were the ten Port Authority employees identified in a report published by New Mobility less than two months after the attacks.

They had jobs, families, and lives outside the tower. Each person who remained with Abruzzo accepted the same danger that was driving thousands of others toward the exits.

The early report identifying them was published on November 1, 2001, while the attack was still an immediate national wound. It recorded all ten as survivors and placed their names beside the practical details of the descent. Preserving the names matters because the phrase “his coworkers” can make collective courage sound anonymous.

There is no reliable record of a grand speech bringing them together. None is needed.

Their decision is visible in what they did.

They found the chair. They transferred Abruzzo. They divided the work. They sent someone ahead. They changed stairwells when smoke blocked the route. They kept the group together.

Because Abruzzo could not independently use the stairs, the evacuation required sustained cooperation rather than a single dramatic act. One person could not simply lift him for a few seconds and then move on. The descent demanded hands, balance, physical endurance, and repeated decisions to continue.

The chair’s design helped, but its tracks did not eliminate Abruzzo’s weight. The turns at the landings remained tight. People had to control the frame so it did not accelerate down the steps or strike the walls.

In a 2007 StoryCorps interview, Michael Curci remembered teams positioned at the front and rear. Abruzzo remembered coworkers alternating as they descended.

The effort created different forms of responsibility.

Not every contribution looked the same. Physical strength mattered at the handles, but so did the person checking smoke and traffic ahead. A team moving a mobility-impaired colleague through a damaged skyscraper needed information as much as muscle.

Those handling the chair watched their footing and the people around them. The scout checked conditions below. Someone had to pay attention to Abruzzo’s position in the seat. The group also had to respond to firefighters and other evacuees moving through the same stair system.

They were not isolated in an empty staircase. Thousands of people were leaving the North Tower while emergency personnel climbed toward the fire.

Near the 30th floor, Abruzzo’s group moved aside for firefighters going up with equipment. He remembered their exhaustion.

The image reverses the usual direction of rescue. The firefighters were ascending toward people they had not yet reached. The coworkers were descending with someone they already knew.

The coworkers did not claim the authority or training of firefighters. They used familiarity, shared work experience, and the equipment available on their floor. Their actions belonged to a different form of emergency response: ordinary people taking responsibility before professional rescuers could replace them.

Both movements depended on time.

Abruzzo had known most of his rescuers for years. He knew their families and had watched some of their children grow. Afterward, that knowledge shaped the way he spoke about what they had done.

He understood that they had not risked empty lives. They had people waiting for them beyond the tower.

Years later, he still struggled to find language large enough for the debt. In a statement preserved by the 9/11 Memorial, he said a simple thank-you was not enough.

The facts support his difficulty.

At any landing, the group could have handed the chair to someone else, separated, or told themselves they had already done enough. Their work was voluntary, extended, and dangerous.

Yet the story is not only that ten people saved one man.

Michael Curci later offered another way to understand the group. Perhaps, he suggested, staying with John had also kept them together and moving.

That possibility cannot be proved as a counterfactual. No one can know exactly what would have happened had they separated.

What is confirmed is that all eleven people remained together through the descent—and all eleven survived.

The group’s survival does not diminish the danger they accepted. The North Tower killed everyone above the impact zone and many people below it, including firefighters and other responders who climbed into the building. The ten coworkers had no guarantee that their stairway would remain open long enough.

Before they reached safety, however, someone else would ask the ten coworkers to leave John behind.