Michael Hingson has spoken out about how his guide dog’s calm demeanor saved dozens of lives during the September 11 attacks.
Hingson, who was 51 at the time and working as Mid-Atlantic Region Sales Manager for Quantum Corporation, was seated in his office on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 struck somewhere between 15 and 21 floors above him. Blind since birth, he had no way of seeing the fireball or the smoke spreading through the building.
What he could do was listen to Roselle.
His five-year-old Labrador retriever was sitting calmly beside his desk as the tower tipped 20 to 25 feet under the impact before stabilizing. While his colleague David Frank began shouting that burning debris was falling past the windows and they needed to run, Roselle simply wagged her tail and yawned.
“She was just wagging her tail and yawning,” Hingson said, describing a dog who showed no trace of the fear she displayed during thunderstorms.
Roselle was Hingson’s fifth of eight guide dogs, and by his own account, the one whose composure that morning became central to how he tells the story today. Having lived with her long enough to recognize genuine fear, he used her reaction to make a critical judgment call.
“I wasn’t smelling any smoke or fire or anything,” he explained, “so I knew whatever was going on was not such an imminent threat that we couldn’t try to evacuate in an orderly way.”
That decision led him to the stairwell rather than the elevators, a choice rooted in emergency training he had actively sought out after joining the building years earlier.
“I spent a lot of time learning all I could about the complex, talking to fire department people, emergency preparedness people, the Port Authority police,” he said.
What followed was a descent of 78 flights, roughly 1,463 steps, with Roselle at his side the entire way. Around the fourth floor, Hingson recognized the smell filling the stairwell as burning jet fuel, information he shared with terrified strangers who had no idea what had hit the building.
By the 50th floor, Frank had reached breaking point, telling Hingson “we’re going to die” and that they wouldn’t make it out.
Hingson’s response was blunt: “David, stop it. If I can go down these stairs, so can you.”
Frank later credited that line with snapping him out of it, and spent the rest of the descent shouting out floor numbers to reassure everyone within earshot that the group was still moving. Roughly 30 people followed Hingson and Roselle’s lead down the staircase.
Firefighters passed them heading up around the 30th floor, carrying oxygen tanks and equipment for the fight still ahead. Hingson recalled resisting their offers of help, saying, “I didn’t want any of them to have to help me. They wouldn’t really know how to do it very well anyway.”
They reached the ground floor and made it outside by 9:45 a.m. Hingson and Roselle were separated from Frank when Tower Two collapsed, briefly reuniting on Fulton Street before sheltering in a subway station and then behind a retaining wall as the North Tower came down around them too.
“There’s no World Trade Center anymore,” Frank told him as they finally stood back up.
Hingson eventually reached his wife, Karen, who told him two more planes had hit the Pentagon and a fourth was down in Pennsylvania, the first confirmation either of them had that the attacks were deliberate. Reflecting on the hijackers, Hingson was firm: “That is not what Islam is all about. That is not what any religion is about.”
Hingson later turned the experience into the outlet number one bestseller Thunder Dog, with a foreword written by Larry King, alongside two further books, Running with Roselle and Live Like a Guide Dog. He now works as a public speaker, traveling the world to talk about trust, leadership and what Roselle taught him that day.
“I’ve learned more about trust and teamwork and moving forward and functioning from guide dogs,” he said, “than I ever learned from Ken Blanchard, Tony Robbins and all those people.”
Hingson continues his public speaking career, traveling internationally to share lessons about trust and teamwork drawn from his experience with Roselle.