What makes a hero?
“Heroes come in a lot of different shapes, size, and forms,” Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno said. “I look at teachers as heroes. I look at firefighters, EMS personnel, people that just help other people just to help when they're not involved in certain things that help and save lives. You know, the world's filled with a lot of heroes.”
Twenty-five years ago, heroes emerged from the rubble of the World Trade Center, Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93.
Several will be honored at an inaugural concert of the Fort Myers Philharmonic at Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall tonight at 7:30 p.m.
They are people like Captain Patrick “Paddy” Brown and firefighter Gerard Dewan.
Brown had just come on duty; Dewan had just finished his shift when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Without hesitation, Brown, Dewan and 10 other firefighters drove Ladder 3 to West Street and proceeded up Stairwell B.
The radios not working in the stairwell, Captain Brown found a phone and called Dispatch.
“Dispatch."
"Captain Brown. Ladder 3.
I’m at the World Trade Center.
I’m on the 35th floor, OK?"
Dispatch: "OK."
"Just relay to the command post we’re trying to get up.
There’s numerous civilians at all stairwells, numerous burn injuries are coming down.
I’m trying to send them down first.
Apparently, it’s above the 75th floor.
I don’t know if anybody knows that yet.
OK?"
Dispatch: "OK."
"Three Truck and we are still heading up.
OK?
Thank you.”
Like an older brother
Jack Dewan is Gerard’s nephew. Thirteen years Gerard’s junior, Jack regarded him as an older brother. They’d even shared a bedroom for several years.
Jack is also a firefighter — with the Fort Myers Fire Department. In fact, everyone in his family dating back to 1901 has been a firefighter with the exception of one uncle, who chose instead to be a cop.
Reflecting on Captain Brown’s decision to continue up the stairwell, Jack Dewan says he would have done the same thing if he’d been in that stairwell on 9/11.
“We swore an oath, and my job is to make sure that people come home to their family,” said Dewan. “If it means self-sacrificing, well, that's what we signed up for. We take that extremely seriously."
After the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., the command post contacted Brown.
”Command Post to Ladder 3. Command Post to Ladder 3. Get out of the building!”
Brown’s response is his last known transmission:
“This is the officer of Ladder Co. 3.
I refuse the order.
I am on the 44th floor and we have too many burned people with me.
I'm not leaving them!”
First responders are ever mindful, said Fort Myers Fire Chief Tracy McMillion, that they may be called upon to make that sacrifice one day.
“Every shift that you're on could potentially be your last one, and so you have to actually … live positively in the moment … making sure you're embracing and loving and living a full life because truly that is that mental makeup of knowing that today could be my last day and being willing to be OK with that,” said McMillion.
Chuck Diaz was a lieutenant in the New York City Sanitation Police on 9/11. He was on Staten Island with an inspector whose wife worked in one of the towers.
A beeline for lower Manhattan
When they learned that a plane had crashed into the North Tower, they hopped in Chuck’s new Ford Taurus station wagon, made a beeline for lower Manhattan and parked on West Street, within sight of Ladder 3.
By then, United Airlines Flight 175 had crashed into the South Tower.
The inspector went to find his wife.
Diaz reported to the incident commander, Assistant Fire Chief Gerard Barbara.
“I came up to him and he said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to help. I have some people here too. I need to find out where they are. Nobody’s answering the radios.”
In addition to the inspector he’d come from Staten Island with, Diaz had two sergeants somewhere on the grounds – Audie Rammairone, who had been dispatched earlier that morning to retrieve new radios, and a sergeant who was in lower Manhattan transporting someone to the department medical clinic.
Barbara sent Diaz to the back of the building. Then, Barbara donned his bunker gear, looked up at the burning skyscrapers and led a group of firefighters into the South Tower lobby. Moments later, it collapsed with them inside.
There was a fruit market set up on the grounds of the World Trade Center that day. When Diaz arrived at the back of the building, he noticed the vendors packing their wares into their trucks.
“I said, are you guys nuts? Get out of here. Leave your stuff behind. Just go save yourselves.”
They ignored Diaz and continued loading their trucks.
“I saw a couple of officers and ordered them to get them out of there.”
Diaz’s decisive action saved their lives because seconds after the officers made them leave, the South Tower collapsed.
“The sergeant I was with yelled, ‘Run!’ I had my back to the complex. Instinctively, I turned around. I happened to look up and I saw the tower was coming down … so I started running towards Broadway. I went face down and as I’m trying to get up, the force of everything falling is pushing me back down. So I’m laying there thinking that’s it.”
Enveloped in a pitch-black cloud of dust and debris and spitting out chunks of concrete and insulation, Diaz had one motivating thought.
“That Friday was going to be my daughter’s Sweet 16. So I said to myself, ‘I guess I’m never going to get to dance with my daughter,’ and I said to myself, ‘I got to get out of here to do that.’”
He heard School Safety Officer Deborah Daris’ voice.
Her leg broken, she was waving a flashlight for help.
Diaz got her
Climbing over a massive steel girder and other debris, Diaz got her, hugged her and helped her to a Burger King on Liberty Street a block away that subsequently became the NYPD’s makeshift headquarters, giving police officers a place to coordinate rescue and recovery efforts.
Once inside, he called for an ambulance, put her in it, and went back to find his men – even though the falling debris had shattered his right arm.
“I went back to look for the sergeant that I was with, yelling his name as I'm walking down the street,” Diaz recalled. “People are just coming out of nowhere, covered in dirt and dust, looking like horror movie zombies. I was yelling his name and all of a sudden he comes out from under a firetruck.”
The sergeant’s name was Perfecto Oyola, and he was one of several first responders who’d narrowly escaped death by diving under one of the firetrucks parked beneath the two towers. (In a strange twist of fate, a firefighter by the name of Adrienne Walsh saved his own life by diving under Ladder 3 when the North Tower collapsed. He’d scrambled under the rear of the ladder truck. The debris from the North Tower crushed the cab.)
Oyola left Diaz with a Federal Reserve Officer to go look for some of their other officers.
Diaz isn’t sure whether mere seconds or several minutes passed before they heard the unmistakable freight train sound of the North Tower coming down.
'Save yourself'
“I told him, ‘Listen, just go save yourself. Don’t worry about me,’” Diaz recounted. By then, fatigue was setting in because of the pain from his shattered arm.
“He says, ‘I’m not leaving you behind.’ He grabs me by the vest, because I had my bullet-resistant vest on under my shirt, and he said, ‘Come on. Let’s go.’ And he was yelling at me, ‘run, run, run.’ So we ran.”
They found their way to a Quiznos.
A woman inside was having a severe asthma attack. Ignoring his own injury, he placed her in an ambulance before walking uptown to his central office.
Diaz’s self-sacrifice typifies the mindset of a first responder, said , Fort Myers Police Chief Jason Fields,
“This is a profession, but I like to think of it more as a calling,” said Fields. “We will not necessarily throw caution to the wind, but a lot of times we do expose ourselves to a level of danger. But we have the training and experience and knowledge behind it to take those calculated risks. But we do it for the sake of others. I like to say service before self. A lot of times we put ourselves aside for the betterment of others.”
Heroes do the work that’s needed.
Even when it’s not pretty.
Like identifying the dead.
That's what Barry Kurtz did in the aftermath of 9/11. He was a dental anthropologist attached to the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team that was sent to ground zero to identify victims.
“The whole purpose of the identification really was to provide closure — emotional closure to relatives and friends, legal closure, death certificates, and also religious closure,” Kurtz noted.
Because the city’s emergency center was destroyed when the towers fell, the team’s first order of business was to create a computer system that enabled them to compare antemortem and postmortem dental records.
Then came the painstaking task of sifting the debris for remains.
“A lot of the remains came not only from the … World Trade Center, but barges took a lot of the debris and remains to the Arthur Kills landfill,” Kurtz said. “From that point, they went on a conveyor belt and a forensic anthropologist and forensic dentist …. went through the remains and identified what was human remains and what was not.”
It was dental records that helped identify Jack Dewar’s uncle on December 8.
But not at Kills Fields where, coincidentally, Chuck Diaz was assigned post-9/11, his arm still in a cast.
“He still [had] his turnout coat on and they had his helmet and whatnot,” Jack Dewan advised. “So they get him up to the morgue and then he was identified the following day.”
The morgue was on West 30th Street, roughly three miles from ground zero.
That’s where NYPD Sergeant Bill Taylor was stationed.
It was his job to wash each victim upon their arrival.
Filled with soot
“Because everybody was filled with soot,” Taylor noted. “You could tell who some of the firemen were. Obviously, they were in uniform and stuff like that.”
It was grueling work.
7 a.m. to 7 p.m., with no respite.
“It was just one day after the next,” Taylor recalled. “Go home, sleep, come back …. I’m glad I was able to be there and help … to be able to just be involved with that more than most.”
Providing closure to families and friends of the missing provided incalculable relief to those left behind.
The earmark of a hero
Service to others before self is the earmark of a hero.
So is respect.
In the weeks following 9/11, Jack Dewan compiled a thick three-ring binder, each page carefully inserted into a clear plastic sheet protector.
“This book has the funeral arrangements for every fireman that was killed on 9/11,” he said, leafing through several pages, beginning with those containing the funeral arrangements for his uncle and Captain Paddy Brown. “All 343 members of the fire department [are represented by these pages]. This just happens to be Captain Brown and my uncle.”
Dewan made it his responsibility to go to as many funerals as possible, even when there were multiple funerals in a single day.
They all did.
It mattered not whether he actually knew the fallen firefighter or not.
But it took an emotional toll.
Some, like Chuck Diaz, struggled with survivor's guilt.
“I don’t know why I lived and other people died because we were doing the same thing, trying to help,” Diaz said. “I can’t tell you. Maybe I had a different purpose in life that I didn’t get to yet. But it’s something that still haunts me to this day.”
An entire generation has grown up since 9/11 that has no firsthand knowledge of 9/11.
The heroes just described want us … all of us … to know and remember what happened that day … and appreciate that this tradition of service before self continues today every time fire, police, EMS and other heroes respond to an emergency or disaster.
“We don’t do it for awards, parades or anything like that,” added Chief Fields. “We do it because we genuinely care about people and want to be those lifesavers out there for everyone.”
MORE INFORMATION:
The following contains graphic descriptions of the events that occurred on or following the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center. They are presented for purposes of describing and preserving what happened to the first responders mentioned above.
Chuck Diaz
After American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower, traffic into Manhattan snarled, but Diaz and his inspector were able to make it to the World Trade Center by following Fire Rescue Five over the Verrazzano Bridge and through Battery Tunnel.
When they emerged from Battery Tunnel, they learned that a second plane had hit the South Tower. At that point, Diaz was concerned not only about his inspector’s wife, but also the two sergeants he had at the World Trade Center Complex.
Diaz has no idea whether he broke his arm when he fell running from the South Tower or if he was struck by debris from the falling skyscraper.
“I actually didn't feel it because of the adrenaline, but I remember laying there in the black smoke and the soot and the debris trying to take a breath, and I can't because I'm spitting out pieces of cement or asbestos or whatever. I'm just lying there and everything's silent. You don't hear anything. Everything's pitch black and you can't see anything either.”
It was School Safety Officer Deborah Daris’ voice that got Diaz up on his feet and moving again.
When they got to the Burger King a block away at 106 Liberty Street, Diaz noticed there were people inside, so he took Daris inside. A number of those huddled inside used toilet water from the restrooms to wash off as much of the soot as possible. When Diaz tried to jump over the service counter, his arm gave out. That’s when Diaz finally realized he’d broken his arm.
His first thought was to get an ambulance, not for himself, but Daris. Once he placed her inside, he headed straight for ground zero to help whoever he could and check on the status of his men.
“I went back to see if I could find the sergeant I was with. I needed to find him. That's something I had to do,” said Diaz. “Then once we found each other, and once I found him coming out of underneath a fire truck and knew he was alive, then I said, we got to find everybody else. It was just something that we had to do. There are people who are meant to do a job, no matter how dangerous it is, and do it.”
That’s what Diaz was doing when the North Tower also came down, covering him a second time in a toxic blanket of dust, soot and debris.
After finding an ambulance for the woman in Quiznos who was experiencing an asthma attack, Diaz headed uptown.
A police cruiser spotted him and drove him to the Sanitation Police Department's headquarters on Worth, where fellow officers used rulers to stabilize his right arm. That is where he was also reunited with inspector Audie Rammairone and the two sergeants he’d been separated from.
“I thought they were dead,” Diaz recalled. “I gave them all a big hug and a kiss because I thought they were gone. So the officer, the sergeant that I had originally sent to Manhattan to pick up the radios, I said, ‘Where's your car?’ He said, ‘The car's gone.’ I said, ‘What do you mean the car's gone? You just got that car. It's brand new.’ He said, ‘Chuckie, the car's gone.’ I said, ‘What about the radios?’ ‘The radios were in the car. They're burned to a crisp.’ I said, ‘All right, I guess I'm going to hear about that one.’”
A few hours later, Diaz’s right arm was placed in a temporary cast. The break was so bad, it required surgery. But Diaz refused to be admitted to the hospital that afternoon because he’d promised to dance with his daughter that Friday on her Sweet Sixteen birthday.
As it also turned out, the inspector’s wife who they’d gone to look for had evacuated right after the first plane hit the North Tower and was on the Brooklyn Bridge when the towers came down. However, she’d dropped her cell phone and was unable to contact her husband.
“I don’t know whether or not the cell phones would have worked anyway because of those towers, but she's fine. He's fine. I'm still in touch with him. He's retired,” Diaz added.
Diaz is currently being treated for leukemia.
Following each tower’s collapse, Diaz was covered by a dust cloud that contained glass, asbestos, lead, benzene, and dioxins. “For first responders, workers, and residents, that dust became embedded in their bodies, silently setting off a chain of medical time bombs,” wrote Guy D. McCardle for MSN in 2025. “Over 33,000 first responders still battle inflamed sinuses. Asthma afflicts about 15% of survivors—a staggeringly high rate. Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) plagues a quarter of those tracked by the WTC Health Registry.”
Diaz also lost part of his right lung last year. The surgeon found shards of broken glass and pieces of insulation inside his lungs.
His doctors recently discovered a new nodule in his left lung.
“There's a lot of guys that have passed from 9/11 diseases,” Diaz said. “There's more people that died of 9/11 diseases than actually died on 9/11 that day. That's why we fought so hard to get that Zadroga Bill [officially known as the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which was enacted in 2010] and the World Trade Center health program.”
The statistics are sobering.
In his article, McCardle reported that “[n]early 7,000 Americans—firefighters, police, medics, recovery workers, and civilians—have died since 9/11, directly due to World Trade Center-related illnesses. Currently, almost 49,000 WTCHP enrollees have been diagnosed with a 9/11-linked cancer, and more than 132,000 people are tracked as exposed survivors—tens of thousands still battling or bracing for disease.”
The FDNY has lost more firefighters to post-9/11 diseases [over 400] than died at the World Trade Center when the towers came down.
Bill Taylor
On 9/11, Bill Taylor was a sergeant in the NYPD. He got ensnared in the massive traffic jam that occurred on the morning of Sept. 11, so he did not arrive at his Manhattan station until 1 that afternoon. He recounted from his home in Cape Coral the scene that unfolded before him upon his arrival at ground zero later that day.
“I saw the piece of the tower sticking out of the ground,” he recalled. “It was like walking through … Universal Studios. You thought you were on the set of a horror movie. It didn't even seem real.”
Taylor knew instinctively that there would be few, if any survivors.
“I felt that they were not going to find anybody,” he said. “I mean, they were down there digging, hoping for survivors, looking for survivors for maybe four weeks. But other than that first day where they found a few guys hiding under cars filled with dust and stuff like that, there was nobody. Nobody.”
One of the police officers in Taylor’s precinct was assigned to the morgue because his family owned and operated a funeral home. Taylor tagged along even though he had no experience in the field.
“I [preferred being] involved down there than go back to regular duties,” Taylor related.
The scene was macabre.
Before victims were taken inside, they were processed on one of 20 gurneys or “slabs” set up in the driveway.
“It was just truckloads of bodies, body parts, an arm, a hand with nothing else there,”
Taylor said. “Each slab had a medical examiner, a detective to take notes and a ‘dirty guy.’ What the dirty guy would do is dunk a giant sponge into a bucket of water and wipe down the body or body part because they were covered in soot. And then the medical examiner would do a quick autopsy before they’d be taken for fingerprints, if there was something to fingerprint, and then for dental.”
Taylor served as a dirty guy from mid-September to just before Thanksgiving of 2001.
“I'm glad that I was able to be there and help,” Taylor said after a moment of reflection. “I mean, everybody, the victims were dead. But to be able to just be involved with that more than most, I guess, regular cops and sergeants in the NYPD, was important to me. It was important to give their families closure.”
Thinking back, Taylor expressed surprise that he didn’t get sick. Just 2.9 miles from ground zero, air quality was poor. But hygiene wasn’t as fastidious 25 years ago as it is today. Even though he was washing thick layers of soot from bodies and appendages, he wasn’t given a mask or surgical gloves.
“I never thought about it,” Taylor explained. “While I was in the moment, we were too busy. It was just nonstop from the time you got there to the time you got home, and you had to be back in less than 12 hours.”
And never once did he think about being reassigned.
“That’s not how we’re built,” said Taylor flatly. “Any more than you’d run if shots are being fired. You can't turn and run away. You might as well quit and not show your face in the precinct again.”
Any more than Captain Paddy Brown and the men of Ladder 3 could complied with the command post’s order to evacuate the North Tower.
“I can't imagine... I can't imagine... Never mind a first responder. Just anybody seeing another person needing help and saying, ‘Hey, I'm getting the hell out of here. I got to save myself. I got a wife and kids at home. I got a husband at home.’ I mean, I think genuinely, most people, whether it's courage or just humanity, are going to try to do what they can.”
Barry Kurtz
Today, Barry Kurtz is a Community Response officer with the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. On 9/11, he had a dental practice in Rockaway Park, New York. He was also a member of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Within minutes of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, Kurtz was being deployed to Stewart Air Force Base.
He spent the next week at a Marriott Hotel across from LaGuardia Airport while HHS, FEMA, the State of New York and the New York Medical Examiner’s Office approved clearances for team members to work at ground zero and the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.
“It’s where they were bringing everything to be sifted through, all the fire trucks and all the cars,” said Chuck Diaz, who was stationed there following 9/11, his right arm still in a cast. “That's where they brought everything.”
The landfill had actually been decommissioned prior to 9/11. It had received its last barge of residential solid waste on March 22, 2001.
Water access, proximity to the WTC site, and available space made Fresh Kills the ideal location for 9/11 recovery work.
The New York Department of Sanitation loaded approximately 500 barges — each containing 600 tons of material — and delivered them to Fresh Kills. Weeks Marine loaded an additional Department of Sanitation barges at Pier 25 for transit to Fresh Kills. In all, about 1.4 million tons of material was brought to Fresh Kills and sorted by forensics, in some cases so finely that the material passed through a quarter-inch sieve.
The operation increased quickly, from processing 1,750 tons of material per day in mid-September to 17,500 tons per day in mid-October.
Time was of the essence, because in the hours and days following the terrorist attacks, the medical examiner’s office was bombarded by thousands of requests for information lodged by relatives and friends who believed they lost loved ones in the attacks.
“We requested them to contact dentists to get antemortem dental records and we obtained our postmortem dental records from the remains that were retrieved by the fire department, sanitation workers and police at that time from the actual crash site,” said Kurtz. “We then put the X-rays through the computer system we created while we were waiting for our clearances.”
Once they received the requisite approvals, members were dispatched to ground zero, but by then, tons of debris were being barged to the landfill in Staten Island.
“The debris went on a conveyor belt, where it was examined by a forensic anthropologist and forensic dentist,” Kurtz recounted. “I wasn't the only forensic dentist. I must say there were hundreds of other responders. I was just one of many, many first responders.”
“I remember the conveyor belts, and I remember the [forensic and dental anthropologists] because they were in Tyvek suits, pulling body parts and personal effects from the debris,” Diaz recalled. “They had buckets and they were just filling the buckets with people's personal items, wallets, watches, rings. They went through everything.”
Dental records were just one means of identification. The team used fingerprints, where available, and relied on DNA results as well.
“I was deployed for three weeks,” Kurtz noted. “But the process took months, years after that. They were still finding some remains in other areas quite a distance away from the actual crash site.”
Material from the WTC site was transferred to Fresh Kills until July 15, 2002. The final items were sorted and screened on July 26.
Throughout the entire process, DSNY’s core mission was to move all the material to the site and sort through it with the utmost care and respect. The Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team’s mission was to recover and accurately identify all the remains in order to bring closure to families and friends.
“Because multiple disciplines are involved in the identification process, fingerprinting, paperwork, DNA and dental comparisons, there was a high probability that each identification was correct,” said Kurtz.
The 24/7, 10-month recovery effort took place without disrupting normal DSNY operations in the city.
After screening and sifting, the remaining WTC material was placed in a 48-acre area in Section 1/9 at Fresh Kills, a 225-foot mound at the western boundary of the park.
To prevent any type of disturbance of the material, a one foot layer of non-toxic, contaminant-free soil was placed on the land below the materials prior to placement of the screened materials. After the sorting process was complete, the area was covered with additional healthy soil to control erosion and protect the site. DSNY’s exhaustive recovery efforts ensured materials were handled with care.
Prior to 9/11, Kurtz was involved through the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team in the TWA Flight 800 crash in 1996. He was also deployed to Haiti in the aftermath of the island’s first earthquake in 2010.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
