The last barrier between John Abruzzo and the street was not a staircase.

It was the damaged lobby.

The North Tower’s lower interior had been struck by debris and disrupted by the emergency response. Chunks of concrete and broken glass covered the route. A conventional wheelchair would have been difficult to maneuver through the destruction.

Abruzzo’s coworkers kept him in the evacuation chair.

They lifted it across debris and followed directions from firefighters who were still working inside the building. When the usual exit could not be used, they carried Abruzzo through a broken window.

The image is supported by multiple accounts, including the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. It is one of the clearest examples of why the group’s work could not end when the stair count reached zero.

The broken window is easy to dramatize, but the verified details are powerful without embellishment. No invented words are needed. A damaged exit, a portable chair, coworkers lifting, and firefighters directing them establish the scene.

Evacuation is not complete at the bottom of the stairs. It is complete when a person reaches a place of relative safety.

Outside, the coworkers looked up and saw fire high in the tower. A firefighter urgently directed them away.

They moved with the crowd.

Abruzzo’s customized power chair was still on the 69th floor. The lightweight emergency chair was now his only transportation. The coworkers who had controlled it on the stairs pushed it along the streets.

The environment outside was changing rapidly. Dust and debris covered Lower Manhattan. People were trying to understand the collapse of the South Tower while the North Tower continued to burn.

Abruzzo later remembered stopping and seeing a city turned white by dust. He also recalled falling debris and people falling from the tower.

The group did not remain there.

Their decision to keep moving echoed the repeated choices made inside. Safety was never a single threshold. The conditions around the tower forced them to reassess each apparent stopping point.

They continued toward the corner of Vesey and West Streets, near Stuyvesant High School. At some point, firefighters took over the chair from the exhausted coworkers.

Then the North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m.

The collapse released a moving wall of dust and debris through the surrounding streets. Emergency workers carried Abruzzo into Stuyvesant High School as the cloud reached them.

He later remembered the world going dark.

The chair had already traveled an extraordinary route: out of an office, across a floor, down changing stairways, through a damaged lobby, out a broken window, and along the streets.

Its journey continued into the school.

When the darkness lifted, Abruzzo was taken by ambulance to a hospital and treated for smoke inhalation. The 9/11 Memorial says doctors advised him to rest for several weeks.

His coworkers survived too.

The story could easily be told as a sequence of lucky breaks. The chair was present. The stairways below the impact remained passable. The group found another route around smoke. Firefighters guided them through the lobby. They reached the street before the tower fell.

It can also be told as a chain of preparedness. The 1993 evacuation produced a lesson. The lesson produced equipment. A fire warden remembered Abruzzo. Coworkers organized themselves. A scout identified smoke. Responders directed them around obstacles. Each link mattered.

Abruzzo himself spoke about luck.

But luck did not carry the chair down 69 floors.

The confirmed record shows planning born from the 1993 bombing, an available evacuation device, and ten people who repeatedly chose not to separate.

Those elements met inside a shrinking window of time.

Abruzzo’s new power wheelchair was destroyed with the tower. His van, parked several blocks away, was never found.

The inexpensive-looking emergency chair survived.

Its survival created a rare form of evidence. Most objects left on the upper floors vanished when the tower collapsed. This one had crossed the boundary between the doomed building and the city outside because people were still carrying the man for whom it had been installed.

After the hospital, it did not immediately go to an archive or museum.

For the next several years, it remained connected to the survivor rather than the institution that would eventually preserve it. Before becoming an artifact, it was the object Abruzzo could look at and know had actually made the descent with him.

John Abruzzo took it home.