Twenty five years ago today a 24 year old equities trader tied a red bandana over his face and went back up into a burning tower until it killed him. Welles Crowther worked for Sandler O'Neill on the 104th floor of the South Tower. Nyack, New York. Boston College lacrosse. When he was six his father handed him a red handkerchief and told him to keep it in his back pocket, and he carried one every day after that. Teammates knew him by it. He wore one under his lacrosse helmet. At 16 he joined his father's volunteer fire company in Upper Nyack. By 2001 he had a trader's salary and a trader's future and he had already put in an application to the FDNY, because he wanted out of finance and into a truck. 9:03 a.m. United 175 goes into the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. The 78th floor sky lobby is right in the impact zone, packed with people waiting for express elevators down. Most of them are killed instantly. The ones still alive are lying in the dark in burning jet fuel and collapsed ceiling, and none of them know that one stairwell is still open. Judy Wein, badly injured, hears a voice cutting through it. A young man with a red bandana over his nose and mouth, carrying a fire extinguisher. He puts out flames. He finds the intact stairwell. Then he says, everyone who can stand, stand now. Everyone who can help others, find someone to help. He lifts an injured woman onto his back and carries her down seventeen flights to the 61st floor, where the elevators are still running. Then he turns around and climbs back up to 78. He does it again. Ling Young, burned over most of her body, is led down by the same man in the same bandana, with another injured woman in his arms. He hands them off at 61, points them toward the elevators, and goes back up a third time. Somewhere in all of that he called his mother's voicemail. "Mom, this is Welles. I want you to know that I'm okay." The South Tower fell at 9:59. In March 2002 they found his body in the lobby, intact, lying with FDNY firefighters and the jaws of life. He had gotten all the way down and stayed to work the fire department command post instead of walking out the door. His family knew none of it. Then that May his mother read survivor accounts in the paper describing a man in a red bandana who came out of the smoke on the 78th floor and told them to stand up. She recognized her son from a piece of cloth. At least a dozen people are alive because of him, and the number is usually put at eighteen. In 2006 the FDNY made him an honorary firefighter, something almost no civilian ever receives. He was 24 years old.