Old Bridge Man Still Searching for Pregnant Woman He Helped on 9/11

Old Bridge, NJ - Bob Small hasn't stopped looking for them. And he probably never will.

On Sept. 11, 2001, this Old Bridge resident was at his job as an office manager at Morgan Stanley on the 72nd floor of the south World Trade Center tower. He had lived through the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and he was confident he and a colleague could make it down the 72 flights of stairs after the first plane hit the north tower.

"There was this boom and a vibration, and I thought, 'Not again,'" Small said. It was on his way down that they encountered a 4-month visibly pregnant woman. "We were probably somewhere (in the) 60th to 65th floor range," he said.

"I just encouraged her to keep going," he told NBC New York. "Every time she wanted to stop, I'd ask her to give me one more floor." He counted the floors as they went. "Sixty more to go. Fifty-two more to go."

What still haunts him to this day is seeing people jump or fall out the burning towers.

"The flames, I'd never seen such an orange color before ... I remember calling out, 'Oh, God' over and over. It was a person. Who was going to help this person? This person is going to hit the ground. This person is going to die, " he told NBC 4 New York.

Incredibly, he said one woman falling actually brought "a calming feeling." "And then this woman fell. She seemed to have accepted her fall. She made a star-like pattern. From that moment on, everything went my way. She was a calming feeling. She got me out."

Small and the pregnant woman finally made it down to the ground. "We said our good-byes when we reached the lobby and they were ushered away by EMTs. As they thanked us for our help, I remember telling the pregnant woman that if she were to have a boy that she should name him Robert," he said.

Small never saw that woman again or the East Brunswick man who gave him a ride back to Old Bridge to escape the burning city of Manhattan. But he hasn't stopped looking. Every year, Small posts a message on Facebook, searching for them. His post from this year has been shared more than 170,000 times. "I just want to say hi, give her a hug and say I'm glad she made it," he said.

The Twin Towers 1987. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons Attributed by Yann