HELPING HAND: Former New England Patriots guard Joe Andruzzi, whose S.I. family includes three brothers and a father who are NYC policemen or firemen who were honored in the Sept. 1, 2011, ceremony before a Giants game in Foxborough (inset), carries a woman away from the carnage after the Boston Marathon bombing Monday. (
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There are heroes everywhere you turn whenever the despicable cowards try to rain terror down on us and ruin our way of life.
They can be ordinary citizens transforming into first responders, they can be EMTs, they can be doctors trying to save limbs and lives, they can be police and firemen and FBI agents … and they can be a cancer survivor and former professional football player named Joe Andruzzi, the angel of another Ground Zero.
The photos of Joe Andruzzi lifting a female Boston Marathon victim to safety should not surprise anyone who knows Joe Andruzzi, or any of the Andruzzi boys for that matter, sons of Staten Island. Their father was a policeman. Joe’s three brothers — Billy, Jimmy and Marc — are firefighters.
“My boys love to help people,” Joe’s mother, Mary Ann, once said.
How ironic that this time, it was the one son who was not called upon to rush to 9/11’s Ground Zero who rushed to Boston’s Ground Zero Monday to help people. Joe Andruzzi, who won three Super Bowls with the Patriots lives in North Attleboro, Mass., and the foundation that bears his name sponsors a team each year at the Boston Marathon. Andruzzi was at the finish line when hell broke loose, and his own marathon immediately began — his race to save lives.
Joe Andruzzi, now 37, was at the dentist when 9/11 turned worlds upside down — paralyzed with fear for hours at the thought of Jimmy (Engine 5 on East 14th Street) marching up the North Tower through the inferno and the choking black smoke on his first day on the job.
When he and his firehouse brothers reached the ninth floor, Jimmy’s pal Derek Brogan began experiencing chest pains. He kept climbing anyway, to the 23rd floor, when the chest pains intensified — it turned out to be a muscle strain — and they began taking him down the stairs.
On the 27th floor, the South Tower crumbled, and their lieutenant, Bob Bohak, ordered everyone else down and out. They got to the fourth floor, where a man they didn’t know pointed the way to safety through the smoke. Forty-five seconds after Jimmy Andruzzi had made it out, Tower 1 was rubble.
Twelve days later — the night Mo Lewis knocked out Drew Bledsoe and the Tom Brady Era began — the Patriots and Jets played for the first time since the terrorist attacks. Joe Andruzzi, a young Patriots guard, led his team to the sideline, waving two American flags before trotting out to the 50-yard line to join his brothers for the pregame ceremony.
“The image of Joe Andruzzi leading the team out to the field, and then running to join his brothers, is something I’ll never forget,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft told the Boston Herald after the Patriots went on to win Super Bowl XXXVI, which Joe’s brothers watched from a Superdome suite. “I don’t think everybody really knows what Joe’s brothers had been through. … We have to go on living. That’s why that Jets game was so important. Because America came back that day.”
Andruzzi and his brothers all wore No. 63 Andruzzi jerseys at the Patriots’ preseason finale against the Giants in 2011, and were part of the 10th anniversary tribute at the Jets’ 2011 season opener vs. the Cowboys.
Andruzzi’s foundation was hosting an event on Boylston Street, close to the second explosion. He and his wife Jen were greeting runners near the finish line at the time of the first explosion.
Joe Andruzzi found himself back in the news Monday after a photo of the former Patriots guard carrying a woman away from the Boston Marathon blast area was widely circulated on the Internet.
Andruzzi’s three brothers were first responders during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. His connection to another American tragedy is surreal, but he dismissed the notion that he committed a heroic act.
“I am definitely not a hero,” Andruzzi told The Boston Globe, “I am just a bystander, and that led to my help. Many heroes that I look upon are people like my three brothers that are running into burning buildings when others are running out.
]“Explosions are going off and they are driving their cars down Boylston (Street) right into the heart of the scene. They are the people that don’t care about their safety and are worried for other people’s safety and survival.
“I turned and saw three young women carrying somebody on their back,” he said. “I ran over, and that’s the picture you saw. I told them, ‘Let me help.’ Scooped her up, and I remember them yelling at the cameraman, ‘Stop taking pictures of my mom.’ I know we were down by Newbury (Street), and walked her down the block and to an ambulance.”
America will come back again. And always will, because men like Joe Andruzzi never stop standing at Ground Hero.
steve.serby@nypost.com