Daniel Lugo

Too Proud Not to Work
Daniel Lugo's asthma was acting up, and his physician had detected the advent of prostate cancer and was debating the most effective course of treatment. Everybody gave him the same advice: leave his job as a Summit security guard at the World Trade Center and concentrate on getting healthy. But Mr. Lugo, 45, didn't listen.

Instead, he switched from the night to the day shift on Sept. 10 and asked his supervisors to give him lobby duty rather than the usual spot shifts throughout the towers. That was his only concession to his iffy health. He told his sister Eneida Lugo that he had no intention of dozing on the living room sofa collecting disability: "I'm a man," he said. "I need to work."

She cannot remember a time when he wasn't industrious on all fronts: back in Puerto Rico, their mother had taught him to cook, clean and fend for himself. A bachelor until a few years ago, when he met his wife, Olga, at a Pentecostal church in Upper Manhattan where he served as a pastor, Mr. Lugo kept up with his mother's lessons. "He even did his own laundry," Ms. Lugo said. "He was taught that you don't depend on anybody else."

But anybody could depend on him, his sister said.