Victim 0001: A chaplain's last walk into the fire

In the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus remarks that a good shepherd will leave 99 sheep to go looking for one that is lost. FDNY chaplain Father Mychal Judge spent most of his life living out some version of that — with alcoholics, AIDS patients, and firefighters on their worst nights.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, at 68 years old, Fr. Mychal did it one last time. He left his friary and walked straight toward the fire that everyone else in the city was running from.

'I'm not finished here.'

Inside the North Tower lobby, Fr. Mychal stayed close to the men he had come for. He moved through falling debris and the bodies of people who had jumped, stopping again and again to kneel, to anoint, to bless, and to pray for whoever was in front of him — the dying and the already dead, treated with the same unhurried attention.

Someone offered him a way out, a seat with the officials heading somewhere safer. He said no. "I'm not finished here."

Witnesses remembered his lips moving without stopping, the same prayer said over and over into the noise: "Jesus, please end this. God, please end this."

He was reportedly still on his knees, mid-rite, when the South Tower gave way at 9:59 a.m. The collapse sent a wave of debris through the North Tower lobby, killing him where he knelt before the building he was standing in had even begun to fall.

A cop, two firefighters, an emergency worker, and a Wall Street employee who had wandered over to help found Fr. Mychal first, feeling through a smoke-choked lobby until someone tripped over his body in the dark.

A photographer caught the moment he was recovered — ash-covered men cradling a priest between them, his body carried like something too precious to be dropped.

RELATED: The little chapel that didn't lose a single window on 9/11

KATHY WILLENS/AP POOL/AFP/Getty Images

It didn't take long for people to name what they were looking at in that image. They started calling it "the American Pietà" — the same posture as the Virgin Mother cradling her Son.

Because his was the first body to reach the medical examiner that day, the paperwork simply read: Victim 0001. Of the nearly 3,000 people who died that morning, his name went down first — the shepherd, oddly, arriving ahead of the flock.

One firefighter later said as much himself. It felt fitting that Fr. Mychal would go first, as if he had simply done what he always did — walked ahead, so that whoever came next wouldn't be walking into the dark alone.

Fr. Mychal was carried the rest of the way to St. Peter's Church and laid before the altar.

The street where his friary still stands now carries his name. And every September, firefighters and family retrace his final walk — from the church where he served, to the firehouse nearest where he fell — covering once a year on foot the same distance he covered without once looking back.

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