At about the 20th floor, John Abruzzo and his coworkers encountered what Michael Curci later described as a triage area.

People there offered to take responsibility for Abruzzo. The coworkers were told they could continue their own evacuation.

The offer was reasonable. Trained emergency personnel were inside the tower, and the ten Port Authority employees had already brought Abruzzo through nearly 50 floors.

They refused.

The refusal is confirmed in both the StoryCorps conversation and the Museum’s account. Retellings place the encounter at slightly different lower floors, so the responsible version avoids pretending the location can be fixed with perfect precision. What does not change is the decision: emergency personnel offered to take over, and the coworkers chose to remain with Abruzzo.

In the StoryCorps account, Curci remembered their response in four words: “No, he’s with us.”

The sentence captured the group’s decision without turning it into a performance.

They had begun the descent together. They intended to finish it together.

Abruzzo later remembered that moment as the point when it became settled: his coworkers would take him the rest of the way without stopping.

This was not a rejection of the firefighters or medical workers. It was a choice to preserve a responsibility the group had already accepted.

The coworkers knew how they had been rotating the chair. They knew how Abruzzo fit in it. They knew which members could handle the front, which could control the rear, and who could scout the route. They had already adapted as a team.

Leaving him would have allowed them to move faster.

Staying meant continuing at the speed of the chair.

The distinction is central to the story.

It also exposes a common weakness in narratives about disability and disaster. The most dramatic moment is often assigned only to the person who lifts or carries. Abruzzo’s account reveals a network instead: prior safety reform, accessible equipment, coworkers, a scout, firefighters, medical personnel, and the survivor himself preserving what occurred.

In emergencies, people with disabilities are sometimes described only as burdens to be moved or problems to be solved. Abruzzo’s own account does not erase his dependence on the group, but it also does not reduce him to cargo.

He was their coworker.

The words “he’s with us” recognized a relationship, not merely a rescue task.

The group continued toward the lower floors.

Around the 10th floor, another rumble reached them. They did not stop.

The lobby below had been transformed by the impact and the continuing emergency. Debris and broken glass covered parts of the route. Normal doors and pathways were no longer necessarily usable.

The chair that had moved along stair tracks now had to be hauled across an uneven floor.

The coworkers lifted and carried it through the damaged lobby. The final exit was blocked or impassable, so firefighters directed them toward a broken window.

The operation required another change in technique. On the stairs, the tracks helped control the downward motion. Across debris, the group had to bear more of the load and protect Abruzzo from glass and concrete underfoot.

They raised Abruzzo, still seated in the evacuation chair, and moved him through the opening onto the sidewalk.

After 69 floors, they were outside the North Tower.

That fact sounds like the ending.

It was not.

The building above them was burning. Debris was falling. Crowds were moving away from Lower Manhattan. The group still had to push Abruzzo through the streets because his power wheelchair remained far above them.

They had exchanged the protected geometry of the stairwell for the open danger around the tower.

A firefighter ordered people to keep moving.

Abruzzo and his coworkers joined the flow heading north and west. At points, the rescuers had to put the chair down to recover before lifting or pushing again.

They reached the area of West and Vesey Streets.

The route from the window to that corner was only a few blocks, but distance in the evacuation chair was no longer measured by stair count. The group was exposed to the open site, without Abruzzo’s power wheelchair and without certainty about which direction was safe.

Only then did they pause.

Behind them stood the building they had just crossed from the 69th floor to the street.

According to Abruzzo’s later recollection, they had been outside for only minutes when the North Tower began to fall.

The survival line had moved again. First it was the office door, then the next landing, then the lobby, then the window. Now it was the distance the group could put between the chair and the tower before 10:28 a.m.