Firefighters who survived twin towers collapse on 9/11 honor "guardian angel"

When the twin towers collapsed during the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, only 20 people who were inside made it out alive, including six firefighters and a woman they now regard as their guardian angel.

On Tuesday, nearly 25 years later, the firefighters reunited in their firehouse, along with the woman's family.

Retired FDNY Deputy Chief Jay Jonas and five of his men from Ladder 6 in Chinatown were climbing the stairs of the north tower shortly after it was hit on 9/11, but it was too dangerous, and they had to turn around.  

On the 20th floor of stairwell B, they found Josephine Harris, a Port Authority bookkeeper who was struggling to escape. The firefighters didn't hesitate to help.

"Tommy and Billy had one arm each. Me and Mike were leading the way down. So it was slow and agonizing, getting her to go down the stairs," retired firefighter Salvatore D'Agostino said.

When they reached the fourth floor, Harris stopped, exhausted.

"And she kept telling them, 'Leave me. I'm OK,'" said Thelma Johnson, Harris' sister. "They said, 'No, we're not gonna leave you.'"

"We could hear her yelling at us, and then that's when the building collapsed on top of us," D'Agostino said.

The north tower fell.

"A hundred and ten stories came down upon us, and we lived," Jonas said.  

Call it a coincidence, maybe a miracle, but the pocket of stairwell B that they were in remained intact.

"If she didn't stop there, we would've been a little farther down the stairway or into the lobby, and we would've been killed," Jonas said.

"They saved each other," Johnson said.

In the weeks that followed, the men of Ladder 6 gifted Harris a jacket embroidered with the words "Josephine Our Guardian Angel."

"We wanted to make her feel like she was part of us," D'Agostino said.

One of the firefighters named his first child after Harris. The baby was born 9 pounds, 11 ounces.

Harris died 15 years ago, and her family had been storing the jacket since then. Tuesday, her sister brought it back to Ladder 6.

"This way, generation after generation can understand, see and know what the jacket meant," Johnson said.

"Before, it was just a jacket. Now, it's something that people are gonna point to and talk about for years to come," Jonas said.

They hope people will tell the story of the guardian angel they stopped to save and who, in turn, saved them.