The Man in the Red Bandana: Trump Awards Medal of Freedom to 9/11 Hero Welles Crowther
On another Tuesday morning in September, 25 years after the attacks, President Trump spoke at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., beside a battered steel beam lifted from the wreckage of the South Tower. Tunnel to Towers had carried the 16,000-pound piece of steel across the country. The gathering marked a quarter century since nearly 3,000 people were killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on Flight 93.
“We will never forget,” Trump said. “We say it and we mean it. We will never forget those we lost, and we will never forget the immortal heroes of September 11th, 2001.”
He pointed to the beam itself as the morning’s physical argument:
“Yet this battered piece of steel here today on the Ellipse is a reminder that America is blessed with a strength no fire can consume, no evil can conquer, and no terror can destroy.”
The speech moved between that vow and the people on the lawn: Frank Siller and the story of his brother Stephen, who went into the towers knowing they might come down; Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who lost his brother and 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees and was on the West Side Highway that morning only because he had finally taken his son to school; first responders from New York, Washington, Arlington, and Pennsylvania; and more than 200 service members. He named the toll among those who ran toward the buildings: 23 NYPD officers, 37 Port Authority police, three court officers, and 343 members of the FDNY. He announced that the Coast Guard would commission a Fast Response Cutter named for Jeffrey Palazzo of Rescue Squad 5, who died with ten other members of the squad.
Then he told the story of the man in the red bandana.
After the plane hit the South Tower, he said, people on the 78th floor were trapped with broken bones, charred skin, and eyes and lungs filled with black smoke. “Death was all about them. It was certain. They were sure they were going to die. Then, suddenly, a rescuer appeared. They call him the Man in the Red Bandana. Have you heard that term? The Man in the Red Bandana. He’s become more famous than me.”
The rescuer had found the only stairwell opening that still worked. He had come down from the 104th floor. He put out fires blocking the exit, directed those who could walk, pulled others toward the stairs, and carried those who could not. He made the trip again and again. “They said, we’re goners. One guy was screaming, we’re goners, we’re goners.” The man kept going.
Trump said the rescuer was a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter from Rockland County named Wells Crowther. His father, also a firefighter, had given him the bandana as a boy. “When asked why he always kept it, Wells replied, with this red bandana, I’m going to change the world. I’m going to change the world with this bandana. Little did he know, on September 11th, Wells saved many, many people before losing his own life in the South Tower lobby when the building came down.”
The highest civilian honor of the morning was the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to Crowther’s family. His mother, Allison, and sister Paige accepted it. Trump said he had promised them years earlier that Wells would receive it. “We didn’t forget. We never forget.”
Allison Crowther’s remarks were quieter than the presidential address and more specific about what her son’s life was for. She thanked the president for “this enormous honor… in remembrance of his selfless actions on September 11th.” She said it would be “treasured for generations to come.” She thanked Rachel Ducey, who prepared the medal proposal, and Rep. Mike Lawler. She thanked Frank Siller and Tunnel to Towers for keeping the faces of the lost firefighters in public view.
Then she placed Wells back among the people who trained him.
He could not have done what he did on 9/11, she said, without Empire Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 of Upper Nyack—the volunteer company he joined at 16, following his father, Jefferson. Empire’s members have other jobs and families; when the alarm sounds they go anyway. “This is a calling, and Wells, following in the footsteps of his father Jefferson, joined Empire at the age of 16. He was no longer an equities trader on 9-11. He was a firefighter.” She asked the Empire members present to stand.
She described a family that had widened after his death: Boston College friends, the firehouse, the people who still treat the Crowthers as their own. Boston College’s motto, “men and women for others,” she said, was the line of his spiritual growth. In the months after the attacks the family created the Wells Remy Crowther Charitable Trust. Working with educators, they built the Red Bandana Project: lessons for elementary through high school students on leadership, caring for others, the power of one person, bridging divides, forgiveness, and carpe diem. The curriculum has been updated and digitized. Traveling to schools, she said, she still sees students take his example as a reason “to be better, kinder, and more caring of others.”
“That Wells’ light still shines brilliantly today, even after 25 years, is testament to his legacy of courage, compassion, and love for humanity that continues to inspire and uplift others.”
Her closing was the point of the medal and of the beam on the lawn:
“Twenty-five years after September 11th, his life continues to remind us of something very simple. In moments when others need us, each of us has the power to choose courage, compassion, and service. That’s the real meaning of the Red Bandana: to be courageous, to find the good, to be the good.”
Trump ended by calling the Ellipse event rare ground for such a display and crediting Wells, dryly, with the weather. The more durable lines of the morning were the two that framed it: a nation “blessed with a strength no fire can consume,” and a mother’s instruction to the students who still wear the story—when others need you, choose to be the good.
