Highlights
- Det. David Salvador, a former NYPD officer now working in Arizona, appears in a widely recognized photo of first responders raising a flag at the North Tower on Sept. 12, 2001.
- Salvador spent months at Ground Zero on recovery and security operations before retiring after 20 years with the NYPD and relocating to Arizona in 2012.
- He has worked for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office for 13 years as the detective in charge of executive protection.
- Salvador has since been diagnosed with lung disease, identified through annual 9/11 first responder health screenings.
A Maricopa County detective who spent months digging through the rubble of the World Trade Center has discovered, years after the fact, that he appears in one of the most recognized photographs of the September 11 aftermath.
Det. David Salvador, now the detective in charge of executive protection at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, was an NYPD officer on Sept. 12, 2001, when a fellow detective photographed first responders securing a flag to the antenna of the North Tower. Salvador didn't learn he was in the frame until a friend pointed it out more than a year later, according to Arizona's Family, which first reported the story Friday.
Salvador described the scene on the pile in terms that make clear why the flag mattered. He said two officers from a Bronx emergency service unit brought a flag from a nearby high school, raised a ladder against the North Tower's antenna, and used duct tape, wire, and bag straps to secure it. Salvador said he cut the straps off a bag and handed them up to a fireman beside him, who passed them to the officers above. He called it the first flag raised in the secured zone of Ground Zero.
"It was firemen. It was police officers. It was construction workers. It was all of us," Salvador said. "All took that moment and put it up, and they called us to order, and we actually saluted the flag, and it gave us the energy to work harder and … keep going."
The recovery work was physically punishing and psychologically relentless. Salvador described the pile, which burned for 100 days, as a shifting mass of concrete, rebar, and ash where workers ran off whenever an alarm sounded, signaling a collapse or a shift in the debris. He said the hardest part was not finding anyone alive.
He also described the human weight of leaving each shift: people outside Ground Zero would stop him, show him photographs of missing loved ones, and ask him to find them. He said he never told them the truth about the odds.
After 20 years with the NYPD, Salvador retired and moved to Arizona in 2012. He has worked for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office for the past 13 years. Annual health screenings through the 9/11 first responder program have since identified lung disease, though he remains active in his role.
Salvador said he stays busy to avoid survivor's remorse and described a sense of obligation to continue contributing. The 25th anniversary of the attacks marks his first time speaking publicly about his experience at Ground Zero.
Sources
Every factual claim in this article traces to one of the sources below. See how we work for the editorial process.
- AZ Family (3TV/CBS5) retrieved 12/09/2026 04:09
Authored by The Scottsdale Signal. Drafted by AI from primary-source material under our beat-specific editorial guides; reviewed by humans before publish under our five-gate process. Sources retrieved at 12/09/2026 04:09. Every claim traces to a source.
