25 years after 9/11, a firefighter reflects on the man he couldn’t save

A Firefighter and a Cop Talked About Their Kids in the Rubble. Twenty-Five Years Later, They Met Again.

Cybersecarmor.com – On the morning of September 11, 2001, two hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center towers within minutes of each other, triggering a cascade of fires, structural failures, and mass evacuations that would ultimately claim more than 2,900 lives. Among the thousands who rushed toward the North Tower that day were two men from opposite ends of New York City: Bill Spade, a Staten Island firefighter assigned to Rescue 5, and John D’Allara, an NYPD officer stationed in Harlem. Neither knew the other’s name before that morning. By the time the tower fell, they had become something closer than family.

The Door, the Conversation, and the Collapse

Spade arrived at the North Tower to assist with evacuating survivors trapped above the impact zones. His radio calls for backup went unanswered. Working alongside D’Allara, he forced open a jammed door that had sealed off a stairwell, giving people above a path back down to street level. In the brief lull that followed, the two men found themselves trading details about their households. D’Allara named his wife, Carol, and his two young sons — John, then seven, and Nicholas, then two. Spade later described the exchange as writing each other’s obituaries in real time.

“Our two units never really meshed together [before],” Spade recalls. “And here we are, working together … in the middle of the towers, of all this catastrophe that’s going on, talking about our wives and kids. That doesn’t happen.”

The conversation was cut short when the North Tower gave way. Soot, concrete dust, and steel debris engulfed both men and the civilians still sheltering beneath the structure. Spade survived by jamming his own finger into his mouth to keep an airway open while the building settled around him. He did not know, in those buried minutes, that D’Allara had been killed in the collapse.

“9/11 Reunited” and the Weight of Survivorship

For the 25th anniversary of the attacks, a three-part docuseries titled 9/11 Reunited is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. The project, developed in partnership with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and production company 72 Films, follows six threads of human connection forged during the rescue operations — ranging from three men who used a window-cleaning squeegee to pry open a stalled elevator car to a first responder who spent nearly 24 hours pinned beneath rubble. One of those threads is Spade’s own: his attempt, two and a half decades later, to sit across from the D’Allara family and speak about the final thirty minutes of their father’s life.

Director Julian Jones says the production team felt a duty to handle participants with extraordinary sensitivity. A roster of psychologists was embedded in the crew, and filming locations were selected only after each family confirmed they felt at ease. Jones notes that many participants carried what clinicians call survivor’s guilt — a persistent sense that they owed something to those who did not come home — and that the series gave them a structured, witnessed space to process that burden.

“We wanted to focus on a terrible, tragic, horrifying event where people just showed up for each other,” Jones says. “There was something about the human spirit there. People were willing to act selflessly for people they didn’t know, and that created lifelong bonds.”

He adds that the entire crew was moved to tears during multiple takes, underscoring how raw the material remained even after a quarter-century.

The Son Who Shares His Father’s Name

John J. D’Allara, now 32 and a Marine reservist who carries the same first and middle names as his late father, says most of what he knows about his dad arrives secondhand — from siblings, from neighbors, from the family shrine at home where an NYPD medal, a diploma, childhood judo trophies, and framed photographs mark the absent patriarch’s place at the table. Yet he does retain a handful of first-person memories: gleeful play with toys, a visit to Sesame Street.

“What I have heard from other people is that he was a great person, somebody that you’d want on the job with you,” D’Allara says. “Things that make you proud to be in his family.”

The docuseries offered his family a different kind of tribute — not a plaque or a ceremony, but a conversation. Spade opened his Staten Island home, and the two families sat together while the firefighter recounted the officer’s final moments and the door they had broken apart.

“The whole process of us meeting Mr. Spade and his family, [with] my whole family, was pretty monumental,” D’Allara says, “especially because hearing stories about our dad and seeing the connection there, him being one of the last people to see him alive… my family is extremely appreciative.”

What Remains

According to the series, Officer D’Allara helped save approximately 20 lives before the North Tower fell. He was one of 441 first responders killed on September 11 — the largest single-day toll of emergency personnel in American history, as documented by the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Spade, meanwhile, is the sole surviving member of his original 12-person Rescue 5 crew. Each approaching anniversary, he says, brings a familiar ache. Every September 11 his household gathers for what he calls a Thanksgiving-style dinner — a small, deliberate ritual of gratitude and remembrance.

“It’s all about family. When those towers were coming down, the only thing I thought about was my wife and my two boys,” Spade says.

That single thought — a father’s mind narrowing to the people he would lose if he did not get out — is the thread that binds the docuseries’ six stories together. It is also the reason the reunion between Spade and the D’Allara family carries the weight it does: not because the grief has faded, but because the bond formed in thirty minutes of shared terror outlasted the building itself.