The 78th-floor sky lobby was designed as a place of transfer.

On a normal morning, office workers changed elevators there. On September 11, it became the location where survival, injury, and chance collided.

Ling Young was among the survivors who later described the man in the red bandana. She had been on the sky lobby when the aircraft struck. The impact left the area devastated and filled it with people who needed direction.

Young remembered a man appearing and announcing that he had found the stairs. He instructed those able to stand to get up and help those they could help.

The words mattered because they were usable.

They did not explain the attack. They did not promise safety. They gave the survivors a task and a route.

Judy Wein also survived after encountering the same unidentified rescuer. She had serious injuries. Later accounts described Welles helping amid fires, giving aid, and organizing movement from the damaged floor.

The survivors’ memories did not match in every minor detail, as is common in traumatic events. They were observing different moments while injured, surrounded by smoke, noise, and destruction.

But several elements aligned.

The rescuer was young.

He was calm enough to organize others.

He knew or found the viable stairway.

He helped injured people.

And he wore a red bandana over the lower part of his face.

The bandana made identification difficult in the moment. It also made identification possible later.

Witnesses saw the man carry or assist people toward the stairs. Some accounts describe repeated trips to the sky lobby. The 9/11 Memorial has summarized his actions as three trips, while other institutional accounts describe the number of lives saved with different totals.

The most responsible conclusion is the conservative one: Welles helped save at least ten people, and possibly more.

The number cannot carry the whole meaning of the act.

Each trip required him to move back toward a place of fire and injury. Each return used time that was disappearing. The South Tower had been struck at 9:03 a.m. It would collapse at 9:59.

The people Welles led downward could not see that clock.

Neither could he.

The rescue unfolded without knowledge of the precise time remaining. There was no public precedent for a 110-story building collapsing after an aircraft impact. The danger was obvious, but the final deadline was not.

Below the impact zone, firefighters were climbing. Above and around it, office workers searched for a route down. Welles moved between those two human currents—survivors descending and responders ascending.

He eventually brought people low enough to connect them with firefighters and a continuing path toward the street.

Then he went back.

That decision ensured that later survivors would remember him in separate encounters. It also meant that no single witness saw his entire route.

The complete story had to be assembled after the fact.

One survivor remembered the voice.

Another remembered the aid.

Another remembered the red cloth.

Together, they described a man whose name remained missing.

At home, the family of Welles Crowther still had no way to connect those accounts to the message he had left that morning.