In the rubble, 'an angel' reached out to save her
Then a voice.
His name was Paul. And as he reached through the dusty darkness of the rubble of the World Trade Center, wrapping one hand, then another around her outstretched hand, he asked her name.
"Genelle," she said.
"OK, Genelle, I won't leave you," he replied.
But then, as rescuers reached her and took her to a hospital, where she spent the next five weeks, Paul vanished, never to be seen or heard from again.
"An angel," she says.
Genelle Guzman McMillan often thinks of that voice and those comforting hands, especially now, as she prepares to give birth to a baby in mid-October. Paul was her connection to heaven on a hellish day, she says. He kept her alive, she believes, not just for the baby she carries, but also for a singular place in history.
McMillan is the last person pulled alive from the wreckage of the World Trade Center.
It was just after 12:30 p.m. on Sept. 12, 2001. The towers had fallen 27 hours earlier.
From inside a dark, hot tomb atop a ragged ridge of tangled steel, two firefighters heard a voice.
It was McMillan, then 30, a single mom, and on the job only nine months as a Port Authority clerk.
"We have a survivor!" a firefighter called.
McMillan's head was pinned between two pieces of concrete, her legs sandwiched by pieces of a stairway. Her toes had gone numb hours ago. Her right hand was pinned under her leg. Only her left hand was free.
For hours, she had reached upward with that free hand into the blackness and dust, pushing and twisting her fingers into the small spaces between steel and concrete.
She had listened, too. She could make out rescuers' voices, emergency sirens, even the beeping of backing-up trucks.
She tried tapping. She tried calling out, but her voice was barely a whimper.
And so she waited. And while she waited, she had a long talk with God.
No one can really explain why Genelle Guzman McMillan lived and so many others did not.
Only 20 escape from rubble
Authorities estimate that 25,000 workers were inside the seven buildings of the World Trade Center complex when the first of two hijacked jetliners struck the 110-story north tower at 8:46 a.m. Sept. 11, 2001. Thousands more were strolling through the 75-store underground mall, milling on the plaza or arriving in subways, ferries, buses and cars.
Thousands escaped — in itself a miracle, not to mention one of the greatest evacuations ever. But when the towers fell, 2,792 people perished. Only 20 who were trapped in the rubble got out, most within a few hours after the collapse.
A First Union Bank employee, Tom Canavan, crawled with another man through 30 feet of twisted steel in the underground shopping mall after the south tower fell at 9:59 a.m., escaping just before the north tower fell 29 minutes later.
One of McMillan's co-workers, Pasquale Buzzelli, lost consciousness in a collapsing north-tower stairway. Hours later, he awoke atop the debris and was carried away by a rescue team.
Fourteen others, including 12 firefighters, huddled in that same north tower stairwell. But their section of the stairwell held together like a protective cocoon. Just after noon on Sept. 11, they climbed the stairs to the top of the Ground Zero rubble field.
Port Authority Police Officer Will Jimeno of Clifton, N.J., was cut from the rubble later that evening. Jimeno's partner, Sgt. John McLoughlin, was pulled free just after 7 a.m. Sept. 12.
It was nearly six hours after McLoughlin's rescue that searchers came upon McMillan.
"I don't like to talk about it that much," she says. "I don't have the answers why I am spared. All I know is that it was for a reason."
But what is the reason?
"It just wasn't my time," she explains.
In April, McMillan returned to her old Port Authority department and a secretarial job.
"I just wanted to be around the people again," she says.
But the people now working with McMillan on Madison Avenue are not the people who surrounded her Sept. 11 on the 64th floor of the north tower.
Simon died that day. So did Lisa, Debbie, Susan, Franco, Steve, Pat and Rosa. In all, 16 workers waited on the 64th floor and weighed escape options after a hijacked jetliner hit the tower, about 30 stories above them. The rest of the floor had cleared out 30 minutes earlier. Why the 16 stayed is open to question. Only McMillan and co-worker Buzzelli survived.
Some say the group was instructed to stay by the Port Authority police, even though radio transcripts show the Port Authority's commanding officer at the World Trade Center, Capt. Anthony Whitaker, ordered a full evacuation of the complex a minute before a second hijacked jetliner struck the south tower.
On instructions from the Port Authority, McMillan declines to discuss why she stayed. What is known from records is that Buzzelli and others tried to seal doors with masking tape, wet coats and towels to prevent smoke from filling the floor. But after an hour, the group headed for stairway B.
Buzzelli led the way. McMillan paused and phoned her fiancé, Roger, who worked a few blocks away at a direct-mail firm. He told her to meet him at the Century 21 department store, just across the trade-center plaza.
McMillan hung up and turned to her best friend, Rosa Gonzalez, and held out her right hand. Gonzalez grabbed it, and the women headed down — 10 stories, 20, 30.
McMillan remembers counting off the floors. Then, she felt the tower shudder — as if it had been hit by a huge punch. It was the south tower collapsing. But in the stairwell, she had no idea of the catastrophe outside.
Up ahead, Buzzelli, who later got a Port Authority medal for his leadership, steadily guided the group down. McMillan remembers her co-workers kept trying to reassure one another, many repeating what became the group's mantra: "We're almost there."
On the 13th-floor landing, McMillan stopped. Her 2-inch heels seemed like 10-foot stilts.
McMillan reached down to pull them off. She would walk the rest of the way barefoot.
She never took a step.
McMillan heard a rumble. "A big explosion," she now calls it.
"The wall I was facing just opened up, and it threw me on the other side," she says.
McMillan looked for Gonzalez.
"I was still holding Rosa's hand," McMillan says. "But she pulled away."
McMillan remembers Gonzalez trying to climb the stairs.
"I got up," McMillan says. "And I tried to go behind her. That's when the rubble just kept coming down."
She never saw Rosa Gonzalez again.
She started reciting a prayer
It was complete darkness.
"I couldn't do anything," McMillan remembers. "I couldn't move. I couldn't get the rubble off. Everything was just heavy. I couldn't see a thing. There was nothing else for me to do."
After her rescue, McMillan would learn she had landed atop a dead firefighter. Nearby was the body of another firefighter.
"I knew that this building consists of 110 stories, and I knew that no one was going to find me under 90-something floors," she says. "I was prepared to just close my eyes and pray that I don't have to suffer under the rubble."
She thought about her daughter, Kimberly, then 12. Then, she remembered her fiancé, Roger. Was he still waiting by Century 21?
"I was praying to God: 'God please save my life. Give me a second chance. I promise I will change my life and do your will.' "
McMillan remembers saying that prayer over and over. She had no idea now how many times she repeated it or how many hours passed. As she repeats the prayer now, she sobs.
"It's so unbelievable that I'm actually here," she says.
As she prayed, she started to hear noises — rescue teams. Two rescuers who spotted the distinctive reflectors of a firefighter's coat in the rubble heard McMillan.
"What is your name?" she remembers one firefighter asking.
"Genelle."
"Keep talking Genelle," he said. "We're almost there."
The firefighters called for an ironworker with a portable torch. He cut away a steel beam; the firefighters lifted McMillan into a steel-mesh stretcher, and then passed her, man to man, down the mound of steel.
In the rubble, she remembers reaching out with her hand. And before the firefighters came and called out to her, she remembers Paul grabbing it.
"I kept my hand out there, praying to God," she recalls. "Show me a sign. Show me a miracle. Show me that you're out there. Show me that you are listening to me."
She repeated the prayer, again and again.
"Before you knew it, someone grabbed my hand," she says.
It was Paul.
She tried to open her eyes but could not. Paul told her she would be fine.
"Just hold on to my hand," she remembers him saying.
She remembers he was not wearing gloves — unlike the firefighter who found her. She also remembers he grabbed her hand with two hands.
"He was holding my hand for a long time," she says. "And then other workers came and pulled me out."
In the hospital, after surgery on her leg to repair nerve damage and to close a deep cut on her left cheek, McMillan asked about Paul. None of the rescuers remembered anyone named Paul.
"No one saw him," McMillan says of Paul — her angel. "No one saw anyone holding my hand."
Two months after Sept. 11, Genelle Guzman and Roger McMillan married. It was a small ceremony at New York's City Hall.
On some weeknights now, McMillan can be found working a volunteer hotline at the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church. Sometimes the people on the phone have no idea she is the last survivor found in the trade-center rubble. There is no reason to tell them, she says.
But sometimes, if her pastor asks, she speaks about her time in the rubble and her long talk with God. It's then that she speaks of Paul:
"I wasn't dreaming. I was wide awake. I know it was an angel. That was my miracle."