The Brother
Who Came Home.

Joseph Graziano Jr. survived the North Tower. The company record shows what he was doing as he came out: helping someone else get out.

Ladder 13 responded together.

The surviving company operations report names six responding members of Ladder Company 13 on September 11, 2001.

Captain Walter G. Hynes. Firefighters Thomas J. Hetzel, Dennis P. McHugh, Thomas E. Sabella, Gregory M. Stajk and Joseph Graziano Jr.

They reported to command at West and Vesey Streets and were sent into the North Tower for search and evacuation, with an assignment toward the 44th floor.

The report states that the crew reached approximately the 24th floor before the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. The collapse changed the operation immediately. Members in the North Tower were ordered to evacuate.

The direction changed. The mission did not.

Ladder 13 began moving downward through Stairway B. The company report says the crew continued searching the 24th floor and floors below while evacuating.

Joseph Graziano was assisting a civilian down the stairwell.

That detail matters because it describes his survival not as an isolated escape, but as an act still connected to the work Ladder 13 had been sent there to do.

Follow the North Tower timeline

He made it outside.

The company report records that Graziano exited the North Tower seconds before it collapsed.

It also records the last place he saw the other members of Ladder 13: in the North Tower lobby near Stairway B.

Walter G. Hynes Thomas J. Hetzel Dennis P. McHugh Thomas E. Sabella Gregory M. Stajk

They did not return.

What the record supports.

Some later accounts have described Joseph Graziano as the only survivor from the East 85th Street firehouse. That formulation is too broad.

Engine 22’s company report documents other members of Engine 22 surviving the day, including firefighters who returned to quarters and Captain Bowles, who was hospitalized with a broken arm.

For this memorial, the precise statement is that Joseph Graziano Jr. was the surviving member of Ladder 13’s six-member responding crew documented in the company operations report.

That distinction does not diminish his story. It makes the history more accurate.

The Yorkville 9

He was helping someone else get out.

Five members of his company were lost. Joe came home carrying the memory of the men he had last seen near Stairway B.

Later FDNY-community testimony

A second account adds context.

A 2018 FDNY Division 7 Training & Safety Newsletter, written years after the event, recounts the descent of Engine 21 firefighter Billy Casey. According to that later account, Casey encountered a distressed civilian on the 26th floor and helped the civilian down to the 19th floor, where he met Ladder 13.

The newsletter says Captain Walter Hynes assigned Joseph Graziano to help Casey remove the civilian. It then records Casey and Graziano bringing the civilian to the street and heading toward an ambulance. A later passage places all three outside the North Tower when the collapse began.

This detail is deliberately labeled as later FDNY-community testimony. The contemporaneous Ladder 13 company report remains the primary source for the memorial’s core reconstruction: Stairway B, Graziano assisting a civilian, and his exit seconds before collapse.

Read the 2018 FDNY newsletter ↗See the archival record

Joseph Graziano Jr. · Ladder 13

A survivor in their story.
A brother who came home.

September 11, 2001 — September 11, 2026