The names of nearly 40 other heroic firefighters from New York who died of diseases caused by 9/11 were added to the FDNY World Trade Center memorial to the headquarters of the Brooklyn department on Tuesday.
The 39 heroes included generational firefighters who followed parents in the department, fathers who rushed into danger without thinking about their own security, and people who continued to plead for the first stakeholders on September 11 in the years who followed the 2001 disaster.
“He led directly to the World Trade Center. He spent the whole day and at night there. We did not know where he is,” said Nicole Doherty about his father, deputy retirement leader Nicholas J. Doherty, referring to September 11, 2001.
“We have heard other firefighters’ colleagues … They saw him in Ground Zero. So they wanted to tell my mother that he was alive and just to wait to hear her in the rubble,” she recalls.
His father – who served three decades with the FDNY – died at the age of 80 on September 20, 2024.
Among the other names added to the touching wall, there was that of the firefighter Christopher J. Revere, whose woman said that he died on March 26 at 9:11 am – whom she took as a message full of hope of God.
“It is really a sign that he is with the father and our son,” she said about her husband, who joined FDNY in 1987 and retired in 2003.
A bell sounded during the ceremony because the name of each FDNY Fallen officer was read aloud, while a family member or a representative for each victim came in front of the room and placed a white rose in his honor.
Tears of sorrow and pride were shed throughout the crowd, while a screen displayed photos of each of the victims.
At least 402 firefighters who contracted their courageous work diseases on September 11 – often cancers or respiratory diseases – are dead and are represented on the FDNY commemorative wall. Before Tuesday’s ceremony, there were 363 names on the wall.
Among the other commeted heroes were the firefighter Jose L. Hickson, 66, who dropped everything he made when he heard of the attack of the towers and rushed into the fray – despite his daughter who begged him not to go there. He died of cancer on April 9, 2024.
Captain Thomas S. Labarbiera, 51, died of cancer on September 1, 2024. Labarbiera followed his father and two uncles in the FDNY and joined only two months before the tower attacks.
He was released for a race on September 11 in an FDNY t-shirt when an officer of the NYPD reported it and told him what had happened. Without a second reflection, Labarbiera returned home and caught her equipment and rushed to the nearest fire station to help.
Fireman Thomas L. Dunn, 52, died in February and joined his brother Jimmy – died of the disease linked to September 9 in 2017 – on the wall. Dunn has made many trips to Washington, DC, after his retirement to put pressure for the victims of the terrorist attack.
The name of Lieutenant James S. Cooney, Sr., 77, was also added after his death in October 2024. He grew up dragging into his father’s fire station when he was a child, served 25 years himself and four with the NYPD, and his two sons serve the fire service themselves.
Then there was Lieutenant Anthony S. Cozzino, 51, an EMT who joined the FDNY in 1997 and retired in 2023. Cozzino died on September 7, 2024, just two months after his diagnosis of cancer.
“Like many first speakers, Anthony has kept his life at work, and his family life completely private, so for us, he was always just husband and father, and when we come here, we see that when he put this uniform and came out in the city, he was so much more for so many people,” said his wife Lori during the Tuesday ceremony.
“It is always as soft, beautiful and sad, we are always honored, but it is always overwhelming each time we come to these beautiful ceremonies, because it simply reminds us what he sacrificed,” she said, adding that he had never had any regrets to put his life on the line that day.
In addition to the hundreds of names on the wall, the FDNY lost 343 members in the September 11 carnage. NYPD lost 23 members, while nearly 3,000 people died that day.
More than 45,000 people are still under the side with the side effects of the September 11 attacks.
About 1,900 would have died of complications linked to September 9.
