Last Survivor Pulled from WTC Rubble Tells 9/11 Miracle Story

Ganelle Guzman-McMillan, as the last survivor to pulled alive from the rubble of the World Trade Center, has one of the most harrowing of 9/11 survivor stories.

She said when she was pulled from the rubble, that it was by a person named “Paul.” But as the years went by and nobody named “Paul” ever could be identified and no one by that name came forward, she concludes that “Paul” was really an angel.

This year, on Sept. 11, she told her story not at one of the many memorials across the city, but at an impressive 9/11 memorial 1,140 miles south of Ground Zero in Palm Harbour, Fla.

Upwards of two thousand people, including numerous former New York City firefighters and cops and at least one Port Authority worker—Guzman-McMillan herself—gathered steps from a massive replica of the Twin Towers gathered to hear her story from the person who lived it.

The unlikely memorial, set within Curlew Hills Memory Gardens cemetery includes two 2,000-pound Georgia granite towers connected by a twisted steel beam recovered from Ground Zero, with an eternal flame burning beneath it.

On September 11, 2001, Guzman-McMillan, was Ganelle Guzman. A year later, she’d married her long-time boyfriend, Roger McMillan, when Time magazine writer John Cloud penned a 5,300 word 9/11 anniversary feature on her, his lead was “Why isn’t Ganelle Guzman-McMillen dead?”

On 9/11, she was employed as an office assistant for the Port Authority of New York and on the 64th floor of the North Tower. At 8:46 a.m., the building was struck by United Airlines Flight 175 between the 93rd and 99th floors. After some confusion, Guzman-McMillan and her co-workers began to evacuate. The elevators were out and so they descended Stairwell B, Guzman-McMillan holding hands with her friend Rosa Gonzalez.

At 10:28 a.m., she was on the 13th floor landing, pausing to take off her high heels, when the tower collapsed upon her. Eighty-four Port Authority workers died on 9/11 including Rosa Gonzalez but somehow, though immobilized beneath uncountable tons of concrete and steel, her left leg badly injured and her mouth filled with dust, Guzman-McMillan wasn’t dead.

But did anyone know that? And how would rescuers find her if she couldn’t speak or otherwise signal she was there? Why not die? She had a daughter to live for, other family and Roger but not previously religious, Guzman-McMillan didn’t have a storehouse of prayer to draw on.

The Gospel According to Paul

In her account, she got sacred help anyway. “I kept praying in silence, not out loud, just asking for a second chance, to save me. And I made a promise to God to change my life, I would live a life according to his will, and walk his part,” Guzman-McMillan recounted.

”And when I felt I was going to give up, in that moment, when I couldn’t be in pain no more, I could feel my body just want to shut down, that’s when a hand reached out to me, and grabbed me by the hand. He told me his name, and he called me by my name, and his name was Paul.”

”He told me got me. I’m going to be fine. And someone is going to pull me out today, I just have to be patient and wait. He kept holding my hand, and I kept squeezing his hand... This guy Paul is holding my hand and promising me I’m going to be fine.”

After 27 hours buried alive, she was rescued in the early afternoon of Sept. 12. She wasn’t officially terms “the last survivor” when she was pulled from the rubble that day as FDNY, NYPD, construction workers and anyone who could help searched for others who might also be alive. But there were none, only the dead, or fragments of them, or nothing. The remains of approximately 1,100 9/11 victims have yet to be identified.

For some time after her rescue, including months in the hospital and multiple surgeries on her right leg, however, Guzman-McMillen searched for a rescuer named Paul but she was told repeatedly that nobody by that name had found her. A German shepherd search and rescue dog named Trakr, who a Canadian cop named James Symington had rushed down with from Halifax, Nova Scotia, had helped sniff her out, but no Paul—who let go of her hand when she was rescued.

”It’s been 25 years, I’ve been searching for Paul, high and low,” Guzman-McMillen continued, tears welling up in many of her listeners. “Paul is never to be found and I just definitely came to the conclusion that Paul has been my miracle angel.”

Guzman-McMillen expounds on this belief, that Paul was a spiritual being sent to her from god, in her 2011 memoir, “Angel In The Rubble: The Miraculous Rescue of 9/11’s Last Survivor.” A film adapation of the book starring Sherri Shepherd premiered on Lifetime on Sept. 12.

“In spite of it all,” Guzman-McMillen continued, “I lost 50 of my co-workers who was with me on the staircase when the building collapsed. As survivor it is my responsibility to tell their story, to honor their sacrifice, honoring those who had not the chance to come home that day.”

Twin Towers Rise Again in Pinellas County

How this impressive memorial far from Ground Zero came to be is a story in and of itself. In 2011, then Palm Harbor Fire Rescue Chief James Angle, having helped acquire the Ground Zero beam with the intention of creating a fire station memorial, was trying to raise funds for that purpose. When he went to Curlew Hills, Keenan Knopke, the family-owned cemetery’s president and CEO, asked “Why don’t we build the memorial at Curlew?”

The cemetery would provide the land and money. Among the design elements that emerged were that the steel beam be accessible, that anyone could physically touch it, and that there also be water, thus on three sides, the beam hangs over a reflecting pool.

Located atop up a gentle hill within the cemetery, the memorial site isn’t visible from the road. Consequently, many people have no idea it exists. As one approaches it for the first time, it defies belief: the re-erected Twin Towers, the North Tower even including a radio transmitter atop it like the original, connected by 150-pound piece of twisted Ground Zero steel.

Numerous plaques and monuments garland the site, and include the names of all the fallen Ground Zero first responders— Moira A. Smith, NYPD: Christian Regenhard, FDNY; Captain Kathy Mazza, Port Authority Police; the rest — and other memorials to the 9/11 victims in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon. Another monument includes a plaque with a replaceable number plate dedicated to those “valiant souls who lost their lives since September 11, 2001, as a result of their actions at the World Trade Center.” This year the number reads 16,997.

Visiting the site on the afternoon of Sept. 10, this reporter met Rich Miccio and Louis Kikis, two retired FDNY firefighters who, as members of the Curlew Hills 9/11 Committee, were helping organize the memorial event. Both men were still trim, mustachioed, affable—and soon to record an interview with a local television station. Before doing so, they pointed with pride to the 2,997 American flags — one for each official 9/11 victim — that had been arrayed around a pond just below where the next day’s ceremony would be held.

Miccio, who had just finished his shift that morning, was with Engine 325, the Woodside Warriors, and arrived at the North Tower shortly after the South Tower collapsed. “I felt the rumbling, I heard the crackling... Some guys went left, some guys went right, and it was luck, that’s all it was,” he told Fox 13 reporter Mark Wilson of his own survival. “The only heroes didn’t go home that day, the rest of us were lucky.”

Kikis, a Captain, arrived at Ground Zero soon after the North Tower collapse, and immediately began picking through the rubble for survivors.

The MC for the 10 a.m. event was Mark Wilson. Among the participants were the Suncoast Pipes & Drums; Keenan Knopke; the Tampa Bay Heralds of Harmony; a vocal group that sang the National Anthem and “God Bless America”; and two grade school 9/11 essay contest winners, both girls, each of whom received a large ceremonial check and cheers from their classmates in attendance. Their essays complemented a large display of 9/11-related art by area schoolkids.

Though the event wasn’t political, there were politicians present. Local Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna was a scheduled speaker, and she was joined by fellow Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, and Crown Heights, Brooklyn native, who’ll likely be elected Governor in November, and Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Inoglia. All three are Republicans.

After a brief introduction from Mark Wilson, Guzman-McMillan took to the podium. Looking younger than her years, she is poised, alternately soft-spoken and passionate and still speaks a with a tangy Trinidadian accent.

FDNY and NYPD Again on the Scene

In the ceremony that followed Guzman-McMillen, a subtle highlight was the Lighting of the Flame underneath the WTC Memorial. Performing this act of tribute were C.J. Messina, retired NYPD transit cop, and Stephen McNally, retired FDNY. If those names sound slightly familiar, in 1996, Messina was shot with pellet gun in the line of duty

In June 2002, McNally rescued a 6-year-old girl named Anissa Cruz from a savage Bronx apartment fire that killed her father and critically injured Anissa and her mother. In January 2018, having graduated from the Fire Academy at Indian River State College in Fort Pirece, Florida, Anissa came to New York to be reunited with the now retired McNally at Engine Company 75/Ladder Company 33.