SUNNYSIDE — By 1988, Greenwich Village was “ground zero” of the AIDS crisis in the U.S., and Dr. Elizabeth Lutas was on the front lines.
But one day on her way to work, Lutas gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR to a young man gravely injured in a terrifying collision between a car and a bus.
“It went through my mind that he could have AIDS,” she recalled. “But I said, ‘His life is worth the same as mine.’ So I just started.”
left this note on Lutas’ door after
she gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation
to a man gravely injured in an auto
wreck. Capt. Vigiano learned the man
probably had AIDS. (Photos: Bill Miller)
Lutas returned home to rinse her mouth of the man’s blood and slivers of auto glass. Later, she found a note on her door from FDNY Fire Capt. John Vigiano of Rescue Co. 4, which responded to the wreck.
“The victim you assisted this A.M, is a probable AIDS carrier,” he wrote. “You know better than me as to any problems that may come of this.
“I certainly pray there are none.”
Lutas took the then-experimental drug AZT for six weeks, and never tested positive for the disease. She then became friends with Vigiano and his family.
The captain and his wife, Jan, had two adult boys, John Jr., an FDNY firefighter, and Joseph, an NYPD detective.
The paths of Lutas and the Vigiano family would cross again in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Lutas recalled exiting the MTA station at Union Square en route to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
Sirens blared as she walked down 14th Street, but upon reaching 6th Avenue, she looked downtown and noticed smoke billowing from the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
emergency doctor during the terrorist
attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. (Photo: Bill Miller)
Then she saw an airliner slice into the South Tower.
At the hospital, she joined an ambulance crew headed downtown to the carnage. The first tower had already collapsed, and the second one started to fall as they pulled up.
The ambulance sped to a makeshift FEMA staging area at Chelsea Piers, where Lutas was placed in charge of triage.
A few hours later, injured first responders were the only patients to arrive. Most had respiratory issues from the smoke and dust. The team didn’t get any survivors from inside the towers.
“Nobody did,” Lutas said.
Still, Lutas said she needed God’s strength to comfort the medical staff and people arriving at the center looking for family members.
The crisis worsened with news that John Jr. and Joseph Vigiano both died at the World Trade Center, Lutas said.
She grieved with Capt. Vigiano, Jan, and their sons’ widows and children. The captain died of cancer in 2018, but she remains close to his family.
“It’s hard to understand why this happened,” Lutas said. “But God was there in the aftermath, helping all of us.”