Police Officer Moira Smith

She grew up in Brooklyn knowing exactly who she was.

Moira Ann Reddy was born and raised in Bay Ridge, a tight-knit Irish-Catholic neighborhood in southwest Brooklyn where the harbor was visible from the hills and the sense of community ran deep. Her mother was from Dublin. She graduated from Our Lady of Angels School, then Our Lady of Perpetual Help High School — the kind of education that plants deep roots in duty, faith, and service to others.

She was, by every account of those who knew her, the life of every room she entered. Fun-loving, warm, quick with a laugh, able to talk with absolutely anyone for hours. She even joked about her maiden name — Reddy — telling people it meant she was “ready for anything.” She was not wrong.

In 1988, Moira Reddy joined the New York City Transit Police Department. She was twenty-five years old. She wanted to serve her city. It was, for her, that simple. In 1997, when the Transit Police merged with the NYPD, she was assigned to the 13th Precinct in Manhattan — the neighborhood around Gramercy Park and the Flatiron District — where she would spend the last four years of her career and her life.

She married James Smith, a fellow NYPD officer. They had a daughter named Patricia. She was, by the morning of September 11, 2001, a thirteen-year veteran of New York law enforcement, a decorated officer, a wife, and the mother of a two-year-old girl.

She had already done this before. That is what people do not know.

On the morning of August 27, 1991, Officer Moira Smith was finishing an eight-hour overnight shift in the subways when she heard it — the crash and groan of twisting metal below her feet at Union Square Station. She ran toward the sound.

What she found was the worst New York subway disaster in over sixty years. A subway train had derailed. Five passengers were killed. More than 130 were injured. The scene underground was chaos: darkness, smoke, wreckage, screaming, trapped bodies.

Moira Smith, three years on the job, just off a full shift, ran toward it anyway. She spent the next sixteen hours in that wreck — pulling survivors out, setting up triage, directing the injured to safety, working without stopping in conditions that would have broken most people before the second hour.

The NYPD awarded her the Distinguished Duty Medal — the department’s recognition that what she had done that day was extraordinary. She accepted it and went back to work.

Ten years later, she would do it again. Only this time, the building would not stop falling.

She was the first officer on the radio. She never stopped moving after that.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Officer Moira Smith kissed her two-year-old daughter Patricia goodbye and left for the 13th Precinct. Her husband Jim, who had worked the night shift, was home. He and Patricia spent the morning watching Winnie the Pooh on the VCR, unaware.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Moira Smith looked up into the clear blue sky, saw what had happened, and immediately got on the radio. She was the first NYPD officer to report the attack. Then she ran toward Lower Manhattan.

What she found at the World Trade Center was not an evacuation system — it was a collapsing structure, a mass of disoriented civilians, and a situation that no training manual had ever prepared anyone for. The South Tower had been struck at 9:03 a.m. Thousands of people were trying to get out. The stairwells were jammed. The Plaza was chaos. There was no one in charge of the ground-level flow.

Moira Smith became that person.

Every time she got someone out, she turned around and went back in.

Survivor accounts of Officer Moira Smith that morning describe the same pattern, documented by memorial researchers, survivor testimony, and the 9/11 Commission’s supporting materials: she did not simply direct people out once. She guided someone to safety — and then she went back into the building for more.

At the base of an evacuation ramp, she stood with her flashlight raised like a baton, waving it in steady arcs, repeating the same words over and over to hundreds of people moving past her: Don’t look. Keep moving. She had assessed the situation instantly: groups of people were stopping in the plaza, staring at the horror around them, blocking the exit paths and triggering panic. She broke the bottleneck and kept it clear. She was, as one survivor described it, the human lighthouse — the fixed, calm point around which chaos organized itself.

One of those she physically guided out was Edward Nicholls, a broker at Aon Corporation, bloodied and battered, one of the few people to escape the South Tower’s Sky Lobby alive. A photographer captured the moment: Officer Smith, in full uniform, her face steady and focused, guiding a wounded man through the smoke and dust toward safety. Her husband Jim would later say, looking at that photograph — the last image ever taken of his wife alive — that he could see the courage and empathy in her face. After she got Nicholls to safety, she turned around and went back inside.

She went back in again. And again. Survivor testimony and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum confirm multiple re-entries. NYPD Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, at the playground dedication ten years later, said simply: “Each time she left to help someone, she went back in — no doubt, she saved hundreds on September 11th.”

At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed.

Moira Smith was inside.

Patricia grew up knowing her mother’s name mattered. This archive makes sure of it.

For months after September 11, Moira Smith’s remains were not found. Her husband Jim brought two-year-old Patricia to Ground Zero for memorials. Patricia, too small to understand, saluted her mother’s casket when it was finally brought out of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Queens in March 2002 — on what would have been Moira’s 39th birthday. The photograph of that two-year-old saluting is one of the most heartbreaking images of the entire aftermath of September 11.

Patricia grew up. She went to the University of Alabama. She became an athletic trainer for the Tulane University football team in New Orleans. She wears a pendant around her neck with her mother’s name spelled out in gold cursive letters, and she says she’s afraid to lose it. Her mother’s actual badge — Shield No. 10467, scratched and dented — is on permanent display at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

New York City named a playground for her — the Police Officer Moira Ann Smith Playground in Madison Square Park, dedicated March 10, 2012, in the territory of the 13th Precinct where she worked. A high-speed East River ferry was christened the Moira Smith in February 2002, with two-year-old Patricia aboard for the ceremony. A portrait by renowned Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick hangs in the 13th Precinct stationhouse. Her name is inscribed at the National September 11 Memorial alongside the 22 other NYPD officers who died that day — the only woman among them.

Glamour magazine named her Woman of the Year. Ms. magazine named her Woman of the Year. The NYPD’s Policewomen’s Endowment Association named her Woman of the Year. The department awarded her its Medal of Honor — posthumously, as it had to be.

The Best of America™ Archive records Officer Moira Smith’s name here because this archive exists for exactly this reason: to make sure the people who ran toward the fire are never reduced to a number on a wall. She was a girl from Bay Ridge who became a woman who could not stop helping people — not in a subway wreck, not in a burning tower, not even when the building was coming down around her. She was thirty-eight years old. She had a daughter who needed her. She went back in anyway.

That is The Best of America. And Patricia Smith deserves to know that her mother’s name is here — not just on a badge behind glass, but in an archive built to make sure it is never forgotten.