On the bronze panels around the South Pool at the National September 11 Memorial, the name reads in full: Albert Gunnis Joseph (panel S-46). To the people who saw him every morning on Morgan Stanley’s floors in the South Tower, he was simply Albert – a 79-year-old maintenance worker and porter, a familiar smile in the lobby and on the stairs, a man who still came to work long after most of his peers had retired.

He was born in Antigua and moved to New York in 1977. Five years later he began working for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. After his wife died unexpectedly around 1988, any thought of retirement fell away. “He didn’t want to stay home,” his daughter Cicely Cornelius later told the Associated Press. “He felt if he kept working it would keep him active and young.” At the memorial service that followed his death, she put it more simply: “He was a strong 79-year-old.”

That strength showed up on the morning of September 11, 2001. As the AP reported, Joseph had hurt himself in a fall the week before and spent that week at home. He went in anyway.

When United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower, traders and staff began the long walk down. Paul Catarra, a municipal bond trader then working on Morgan Stanley on the 60th floor, recognized the porter he had passed every day for years – eight years of greetings without ever learning his name. Joseph was limping in a smoky stairwell. He initially refused help. Catarra and a coworker insisted, essentially carrying him down some twenty flights, then handed him to firefighters treating the injured at the base of the towers. (Catarra’s account is also told in the New York Post.)

Minutes later the South Tower collapsed. Albert Joseph was among the many who were buried in the debris. He was among a much smaller number of people pulled out alive. He had broken numerous bones in his face and nearly lost a thumb. It took his family about two days to find him at New York University Downtown Hospital, still in a coma and on a respirator. He later regained enough awareness to recognize them. In October of 2001, he was moved to a rehabilitation facility in Edison, New Jersey.

On January 1, 2002, Albert Joseph died of a heart attack there. Because his passing was directly linked to the injuries he sustained on September 11, he was officially counted among the victims of the World Trade Center attacks — a CNN memorial profile listed him among the dead that spring. On the evening of January 7, hundreds gathered at United Moravian Church on East 127th Street in Harlem to remember him for quiet strength – the man who always smiled, who said hello, who kept showing up. Paul Catarra attended the funeral.

Caribbean commemorations list Albert Joseph among the Antigua and Barbuda dead of 9/11. He is often counted among the oldest people killed in the towers themselves.

He was not a trader or a firefighter. He was the face in the hallway who kept working so he would stay active and young – and who, when the stairs filled with smoke, was carried down by a younger coworker who finally learned his name.

Editor’s note: In the years immediately following the September 11 terrorist attacks, I volunteered to write a memorial tribute to one of the many people who lost their lives that day, or as a result of it. Albert Joseph was the person I was assigned.

At the time, I didn’t have a lot of information about him, and I’m glad that more has come to light since then so that I can give him a more fitting tribute. The website that my initial tribute was posted to is long-defunct, so it seems fitting to re-create it here -— on what is easily my longest-running website —- on the 25th anniversary of those terrible terrorist attacks.

Rest in peace, Mr. Joseph.