More Than the Uniform: Stephen Spelman’s Story of Survival, Recovery, and a Legacy Carried Forward

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Stephen Spelman was sitting in a classroom at the New York City Fire Academy. 

An FDNY EMT and instructor, Spelman was completing refresher training to renew both his instructor credentials and his EMT certification. It was an ordinary act in a career built around readiness: return to the classroom, sharpen the skills, and remain prepared for the next call. 

Then several officers’ pagers sounded. They stood and left the room. Soon, Spelman and the others were directed to the day room and told to turn on the television. 

Like millions of people watching that morning, they initially tried to make sense of the image on the screen. An aircraft had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center against a clear blue sky. Perhaps, they thought, it had been a terrible accident. 

Then the second aircraft struck. 

“Obviously, we knew it was an attack,” Spelman recalled. “And we were mobilized.” 

In that moment, the refresher course ended, and everything Spelman had learned across nearly two decades in emergency medical services was about to be tested on a scale for which no classroom could fully prepare him. 

Beyond Anything They Had Trained For 

Spelman began working in New York City’s 911 system in 1984 and with the FDNY in 1986. By September 2001, he had responded to countless emergencies and trained for mass-casualty incidents, aircraft accidents, and building collapses. 

Those exercises might involve dozens of patients, perhaps even 100 or more. What unfolded in Lower Manhattan was beyond anything he had imagined. 

Four responders traveled together from the academy, with Spelman driving. As they crossed from Queens toward Brooklyn and then Manhattan, the voices coming across the radio told them how quickly the response was being overwhelmed. The transmissions were crowded and sometimes difficult to understand, but the urgency was unmistakable. 

From the Kosciuszko Bridge, Spelman could see the familiar New York skyline. He had made that drive thousands of times. Now, both towers were burning, with black smoke rising into the otherwise brilliant morning sky. 

“It was just very surreal,” he said. 

By the time the crew reached Lower Manhattan, unreliable radio communications left many responders uncertain about exactly what had happened. Papers drifted through the air. Dust and debris covered the streets. Spelman stopped approximately three blocks away, positioned the vehicle for a rapid departure, and joined his partner in gathering a stretcher, oxygen, and medical bags. The two Paramedics who had ridden with them staffed a nearby Mobile Emergency Response Vehicle. 

Spelman and his partner started toward the command post near the North Tower. Moving in the opposite direction was what he remembers as a wall of people … thousands trying to escape. 

EMS training took over. People who could walk were directed away from the danger. Spelman and his partner continued forward, carrying their equipment against the flow of the crowd. 

At Vesey and West streets, an FDNY lieutenant asked them to search vehicles buried beneath debris and determine whether anyone inside could be helped. They completed the search and returned to report their findings. 

Spelman barely had time to address the lieutenant before he heard a deep rumble. 

The Moment Everything Slowed Down 

The sound grew as the floors of the North Tower began collapsing onto one another. Spelman turned and ran north on West Street. 

For nearly every moment before that, his mind had been focused on reaching patients and helping others. Now, instinct took over. 

“My mind just went completely into survival mode,” he said. “I thought that was it. I thought, ‘This is how I’m going to die.’” 

He knew he could not outrun a falling skyscraper. Yet he ran. Time seemed to slow, and he became aware of every stride and every muscle moving his body forward. Then the cloud overtook the street. 

Spelman survived. 

The lieutenant who had sent Spelman and his partner away from the immediate area did not. Spelman believes that assignment saved their lives. 

As light became visible through the dust, Spelman continued north until he reached the emergency vehicle. Responders loaded as many people as they could inside and even on top of it, then moved farther from the site. At a small tourist stand, they found water and tried to clear the dust from their faces and equipment. 

Around them, a reality no one could yet fully comprehend was taking shape. 

For Spelman, surviving the collapse was not the end of the story. In many ways, it marked the beginning of a struggle that would take years to understand. 

The Emergencies Responders Carry Home 

Spelman returned to the World Trade Center site repeatedly during the days that followed. After roughly nine days, he could no longer bring himself to go back. The conditions were overwhelming, and he feared discovering that one of the many missing responders was someone he knew. 

Then came the difficult transition back to ordinary calls. 

There was no switch that could return life to what it had been before September 11, 2001. Spelman remembers grief, anger, and uncertainty. Responders held onto hope that missing colleagues might be alive somewhere within a survivable pocket. At the same time, they returned to answering routine calls while people continually asked them what they had seen. 

“It was like a bad movie or a dream that you don’t wake up from,” he said. “And it was reality.” 

Spelman increasingly turned to alcohol to manage what he was carrying. He is careful not to attribute everything that followed solely to September 11. His trauma had accumulated during years of EMS work in the 1980s and 1990s, he said, and the attacks became an accelerant for pain he had never learned how to address. 

In EMS, Clinicians routinely enter someone else’s worst moment. They respond to devastating injuries, sudden deaths, and families whose lives have changed without warning. Responders are prepared to manage the scene and care for the patient, but Spelman’s generation was not always taught what to do with the memories afterward. 

He learned to appear unaffected in front of coworkers, police officers and others on the scene, even when an experience followed him home. Drinking became a way to quiet what he could not leave behind. 

“We take care of everybody else, but not ourselves,” he said. 

By early 2003, Spelman had reached a crisis point. On February 7, he no longer wanted to live. In that decisive moment, however, he picked up the telephone and called his counseling unit for help. 

That call saved his life. 

Recovery did not happen instantly. Spelman entered treatment, experienced a setback, and returned. Through rehabilitation, counseling, and sobriety, he began to understand the cumulative effects of a career spent witnessing trauma. He also discovered that asking for help was not a failure of strength. It was an act of survival. 

He has remained sober ever since. 

“My life is worth something,” Spelman said. “There is a purpose on this earth, and it’s bigger than me.” 

A Message for the Next Generation 

Today, Spelman speaks openly about his experience because he wants the next generation of EMTs, Paramedics, firefighters and other public safety professionals to have tools his generation often lacked. 

His advice begins with an important distinction: the uniform may be part of a responder’s identity, but it should never become the entirety of that identity. 

“Hobbies, mental health and family are so important,” he said. “Don’t make the uniform your complete life.” 

He encourages responders to build meaningful lives away from work, stay connected with family and friends, seek counseling, and find trusted people with whom they can speak honestly. Support might come from a mental health professional, a peer, a family member, a faith community, or a veteran Clinician who understands the work. 

He also recommends writing. Journaling after an important call can give responders a healthier place to put what they have experienced. That does not mean recording only tragedy. Spelman encourages them to remember the unusual calls, the funny moments, the people whose lives they helped save and the quiet encounters in which simple kindness made a difference. 

Kindness, he believes, is itself an essential clinical skill. 

The person struggling with substance use or lying on the floor is still someone’s parent, child, sibling or spouse. That person’s life was not always defined by the condition in which an EMS crew finds them. Responders may never know the experiences that brought a patient to that moment. 

“Instead of taking them down, lend a hand,” Spelman said. “You might be surprised at what you can do to change somebody’s life when you’re kind to them.” 

He knows because someone extended that hand to him. 

A Ladder Rung Finds Its Way to Ohio 

The path that eventually connected Spelman to Ohio began with a note tucked inside a pair of work gloves in Lower Manhattan. 

In the aftermath of September 11, volunteers from across the country found ways to support those working at the World Trade Center site. Food, supplies and services arrived from nearly everywhere. When Spelman’s boss, Lt. Dominick Maggiore, received a new pair of gloves, he found a handwritten message inside thanking whichever responder received them for serving. 

The note had been written by a Boy Scout from Ohio. Through an extraordinary coincidence, Maggiore discovered that the Scout belonged to the same numbered troop as his own son’s troop in New York. The young man was the nephew of Warren Motts, founder of the Motts Military Museum in Groveport, a suburb of Columbus, and about 30 minutes southeast of the National Registry of EMTs headquarters. 

From that note grew a lasting relationship between New York City responders and an Ohio community hundreds of miles away. Maggiore became connected with the museum, and efforts were later made to bring a piece of FDNY Ladder 18 to Groveport for preservation and remembrance. 

Spelman entered the story in 2017, when Maggiore asked him to travel to Ohio and speak about his experience. A hurricane prevented Spelman from making the trip. About a month later, however, a package from the Motts Military Museum arrived at his home. 

Inside was a rung from Ladder 18, sent in appreciation for his willingness to share his story. 

When Spelman opened the package with his young son, Mathew, the artifact immediately transported him back to the World Trade Center site. Both were overwhelmed with emotion.  

Mathew, then only eight or nine years old, saw the importance and knew it needed to be shared. 

“Dad, let’s memorialize it,” he said. 

Those four words changed the direction of the gift, and it helped give new direction to Spelman’s own story. 

A Son Carries the Story Forward 

Spelman and Mathew began looking for opportunities to display the ladder rung and teach others about September 11. At first, finding interested venues was difficult. Eventually, they established an annual memorial near their Florida home and began traveling together to remembrance events. 

Each year, Spelman and Mathew return to Groveport, where Madison Township Fire & EMS and Motts Military Museum host the community’s September 11 remembrance. For Spelman, the connection is a reminder that the work of EMS transcends geography. 

“It doesn’t matter where we’re from,” he said. Whether someone serves in New York, Columbus, or a community across the world, responders encounter the same fear, grief, and human vulnerability. “It’s a different patch,” he said, but the responsibility to care for people and for one another is shared. 

What began with a Boy Scout’s note and a ladder rung has become an extended family for Spelman and Mathew. Their annual visit to Groveport offers a place to remember without the intensity of returning to Lower Manhattan, while keeping alive the names and lives of those who were lost. 

Mathew has grown up alongside that mission. Now 17, he is no longer simply accompanying his father. He is speaking publicly and carrying the story to people for whom September 11 is history rather than lived memory. He recently spoke at an FDNY firehouse in Manhattan and is preparing to speak in Groveport. 

Spelman describes his son as focused, compassionate, and unusually purposeful for his age. Mathew plans to study business and is considering military service. He may not follow his father into EMS, but he is already carrying forward the most important parts of his father’s legacy: service, remembrance, and care for others. 

“That’s my goal,” Spelman said, “to keep that legacy alive and keep the brothers’ memories and their names in everybody’s ears.” 

More Than the Uniform 

Spelman served with the FDNY for 23 years, from 1986 until 2009. His career included one of the darkest days in American history, but September 11 alone does not define his service. 

His story is also found in the decades of calls that came before and after it, in the people he helped, in the moment he chose to ask for help himself and in the life he rebuilt through recovery. 

It lives in the message he now shares with younger responders: prepare for the emergency, but also prepare to care for yourself when the call is over. Hold close the people who know you without the uniform. Find interests that remind you there is a world beyond the job. Speak honestly about what hurts. Write down what matters. And never underestimate what kindness can do for a patient – or for a fellow responder. 

Most of all, his story lives in Mathew. 

When a piece of Ladder 18 arrived in the mail, Spelman saw an artifact. His young son saw a responsibility. Together, they turned it into a memorial and then into a promise: that the lives behind the names will continue to be remembered, and that the lessons learned through service, trauma and recovery will be shared with those who follow. 

Spelman once believed his pain was something he had to carry alone. Today, he understands that accepting a hand can save a life, and extending one can do the same. 

That may be the most important lesson he and Mathew carry forward.