Five portraits of lives forever changed by 9/11 (2024)

Five portraits of lives forever changed by 9/11 (1)

A cop.

A firefighter.

A soldier.

A widow.

A set of grandparents.

Five stories, each one separate and distinct, yet all irrevocably linked by a singularly tragic event that America knows by two iconic numbers: 9/11.

It’s been 15 years since that clear, blue September morning, when the dawn beamed with golden clarity and the breeze exhaled a gentle hint of autumn.

We know what happened, of course. The images of that day are seared into our collective memory: The four commercial jetliners, hijacked by Islamist extremists bent on holy war. The slow toppling of 110-story twin towers. The blackened Pentagon walls. The scar of wreckage in that Pennsylvania farm field.

We scanned the lines of bewildered survivors for familiar faces. We looked into the exhausted eyes of the police and firefighters. We held candles. We prayed. We sang “America the Beautiful” and waved flags. We hugged as the lists of the missing grew.

We felt together. Then we fell apart. And as the years piled together, we endured a widening ripple of changes that touched almost every aspect of American life.

We removed our shoes at airports. We saw our “wounded warriors” return from multiple deployments. We were introduced to a new lexicon of foreboding terms – waterboarding and lone-wolf terrorists, WikiLeaks and watch lists, refugees and ISIS.

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Now, 15 years later and in the midst of a contentious presidential election in which most people hold an unfavorable view of the major candidates, we are still trying to stop terrorism.

Inevitably, however, America’s 9/11 narrative is about ordinary people who found themselves in extraordinary situations.

Rookie Port Authority Police Officer Will Jimeno ran into the World Trade Center – then was buried in the rubble when the Twin Towers collapsed. He was rescued 13 hours later from his would-be tomb and honored for his bravery, his ordeal depicted in a movie starring Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage. But today, Jimeno, 48, who is too disabled to work, still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and a persistent anger that he was not able to save more people.

New York City firefighter Michael Ciampo, who grew up in Wyckoff, rushed to Ground Zero from his home in Goshen, New York. Soon after arriving at the pile of burning, twisted rubble,

Ciampo, then 39, learned how personal the 9/11 tragedy would become. Another Wyckoff native, Dana Hannon, a 29-year-old rookie who followed Ciampo into the FDNY, was missing, along with 342 other firefighters. Now 54 and nearing retirement, Ciampo still grieves for his young protégé.

James Egan of Glen Rock was just 22 years old, a newly commissioned Army lieutenant who desperately wanted to fight the terrorists who attacked his country. He ended up instead in Iraq – for two combat tours in a war that still shows little sign of ending. Now 37 and out of the Army, he wonders whether it was all worth it.

Kristen Breitweiser of Middletown was just 30 and left to raise a 2-year-old daughter after her husband, Ronald, 39, who grew up in Rutherford and was a rising star on Wall Street, perished in the collapse of the Twin Towers. Breitweiser, a lawyer, turned her grief into political action as one of the so-called Jersey Girls who pressured Congress and the White House to investigate the 9/11 attacks. Now 45 and living in a secluded corner of New York State to avoid reminders of her once happy life in New Jersey, she is still fighting the federal government for more information about 9/11 – and raising her daughter, now 17.

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Joe and Linda Zadroga of North Arlington were counting on being quiet grandparents in a new retirement home at the Jersey Shore. Instead they find themselves serving as parents to 14-year-old Tyler Ann, orphaned when their son James, a decorated New York City police detective, died as a result of inhaling toxic dust at Ground Zero, and James’ wife died of a heart attack partially brought on by the stress of her husband’s failing health. Today the Zadrogas – Linda is 70 and Joe, 69 — take some comfort in the federal law named after their son, the Zadroga Act, which provides medical care for the thousands of former Ground Zero workers suffering from respiratory ailments and other health problems.

A cop. A firefighter. A soldier. A widow. A set of grandparents.

They are just five story lines from the thousands that continue to flow from the 9/11 tragedy. But each represents a unique portrait of America in the wake of its most devastating terrorist attack.

Five glimpses of what we have endured.

Five lessons for our collective future.

Five portraits of lives forever changed by 9/11 (2)

The Cop

Will Jimeno remembers the light.

It was filtered by the omnipresent dust but it illuminated a jagged hole, perhaps 20 feet above him, probably no more than a few feet in diameter. He couldn’t tell for sure. He felt groggy, bewildered, scared. But that muted sunlight was his only hopeful sign, a window that framed the sky – and possible survival.

It was just after 10 a.m.

The south tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan had just collapsed, its 110 floors pancaking in a thick gray-brown cloud of broken concrete, shattered glass, twisted steel and human remains.

Jimeno — a rookie Port Authority police officer with a 4-year old daughter at home in Clifton with his wife, Allison, who was seven months pregnant — was trapped 20 feet underground in a tiny cave of broken concrete pilings and steel beams. His body was pressed into a 45-degree angle; he thought that space might be his tomb.

An immigrant from Colombia who grew up in Hackensack, where his father labored as a welder and his mother in a hair salon, Jimeno had been part of a five-man team of Port Authority cops who were trying to rescue workers from lower levels of the Trade Center.

As the five donned helmets and headed below ground, Jimeno remembers, “We promised each other that we would take care of each other and wouldn’t leave each other.”

Now Jimeno was helpless. He could talk and shake his head from side to side. He could also move his hands and arms. But he could not move anything else.

“It was like having 20 Chevy Suburbans on top of you,” he recalled recently at the home in Chester, where he now lives with Allison and their daughters, Bianca, 18, and Olivia, 14.

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Two officers in the rescue team, Christopher Amoroso, 29, of North Bergen and Antonio Rodrigues, 35, of Port Washington, had been killed instantly by falling beams. But Jimeno and two others were alive.

Officer Dominick Pezzulo, 36, of the Bronx was pinned on his stomach a few feet from Jimeno. The rescue team’s leader, Sgt. John McLoughlin, 48, of Middletown, N.Y., was 20 feet away, unable to move but still able to speak.

So began a daylong battle to survive, and then years of trying to sort through the memory of what happened – an ordeal that was depicted in the 2006 movie “World Trade Center,” directed by Oliver Stone.

Pezzulo wiggled himself free. Crouching in the tiny pocket, he gazed toward the hole above and the sunlight and told Jimeno he could climb to safety and then return with a rescue team. But Pezzulo quickly rejected the thought. Jimeno remembers him reasoning that he might not find his way back if he left.

Pezzulo grabbed a piece of rebar and chipped at the concrete that wrapped Jimeno’s muscular frame.

It was now 10:28 a.m.

Jimeno remembers a steady rumbling, then a series of horrific thumps, each one louder. It was the north tower — collapsing in its own crushing cascade.

Jimeno looked up. Somehow the rubble had not covered his skylight. He could still see in the faint light.

But Pezzulo had been struck by a piece of steel and was down. Blood streamed from his mouth. More blood soaked his chest. Before losing consciousness, Jimeno says, Pezzulo tried one last time to summon help – firing a single shot from his police handgun through the hole and into the dusty air.

No one heard the shot. Minutes later, Pezzulo slumped over and died.

Jimeno thought about giving up. Fire licked the beams and broken concrete nearby. He was dry-bone thirsty and covered with dust.

“I couldn’t even spit,” he said. “But if I give up, the terrorists win.”

McLoughlin was still alive too. The two officers had worked together, policing the Port Authority Bus Terminal. But they did not know each other well. They talked back and forth as the time passed, sometimes praying or telling stories about their families, their police careers and the steady pain in their legs.

The sun set. The light from the overhead hole grew ever more dim and finally vanished. Three more hours passed and Jimeno heard a voice. A Marine, who had rushed to Ground Zero on his own to help, was calling out for survivors.

Jimeno yelled back. A flashlight beam poked through the hole above him.

It took five more hours to pull Jimeno from the rubble – another five to rescue McLoughlin. It then took eight surgeries to repair Jimeno’s wounds, more than a dozen for McLoughlin – plus months of physical therapy.

They were among a tiny number of first responders to emerge from the rubble of the Twin Towers’ collapse, which killed 37 Port Authority officers, 23 New York City police officers, 343 New York city firefighters and more than two dozen emergency workers from other agencies.

Today, Jimeno, 49, wears a brace on his left leg and a special stocking to support his pulverized muscles. Sitting in his kitchen in Chester recently, he pulled up his pants leg and revealed another wound – a half-inch-wide hole in his thigh muscle.

“The rebar did this,” he said.

Jimeno gives speeches to community groups, continually reminding his audiences about the need to keep faith in one another during hard times. He concedes that he struggles, however, with his own anger – over the growing problem of terrorism, the polarizing politics that have fractured America and the terrible memory of losing other officers, especially Pezzulo, Amoroso and Rodrigues, who were part of his rescue team.

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He keeps steady, however, when he thinks of the hole above him when he was trapped in the rubble and the light that poured through.

“I still have so much faith in this nation. I still have so much faith in people,” he said. “I don’t want people to forget that on 9/11 with so much horror, so much death, I saw so much love.”

Five portraits of lives forever changed by 9/11 (3)

The Firefighter

Lt. Michael Ciampo of the New York City fire department says he lives by a simple credo.

Fighting fires, he says, is not just a job. It’s a family affair.

Ciampo’s great-grandfather founded a volunteer fire unit in Lodi more than a century ago. His grandfather helped start another volunteer unit when the family moved to Fair Lawn.

In Wyckoff, where Ciampo grew up, his father became chief of the borough’s volunteer fire service for a time.

It was only natural that Ciampo joined Wyckoff’s department as soon as he was eligible. And so it was also natural that he would become friends with Dana Hannon, who was 10 years younger but whose family also had deep, multigenerational roots in the department.

A decade after Ciampo left Wyckoff and joined the FDNY, Hannon followed in the footsteps of his mentor.

“You grow up with it. There is something deep in you that makes you want to help other people,” said Ciampo as he recalled how he saw a piece of himself in the younger Hannon. “There is a desire to help people.”

Around 8:45 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Ciampo stepped out of the shower at his home in Goshen. He had already been called in to work an overtime shift at his Bronx fire station.

Then the phone rang. It was Ciampo’s sister telling him to turn on the TV. The north tower at the World Trade Center was burning.

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Ciampo sensed this would be a long day. He packed extra clothes, soap and a toothbrush.

“That’s when I saw the second plane hit,” he said. “That’s when I knew we were under attack.”

Ciampo got into his SUV and headed for New York City.

Dana Hannon was on duty.

Since graduating from the FDNY academy 18 months earlier, Hannon had been participating in a special training program for new recruits, putting in stints in firehouses around the city to learn techniques for battling fires in different types of structures – factories in Queens, homes in the Bronx, row houses in Brooklyn.

On Sept. 11, Hannon was assigned to a midtown Manhattan fire station, learning how to battle fires in high-rise buildings.

Hannon now lived just over the New Jersey border in Suffern, N.Y., and was engaged to be married. But he kept his ties to Wyckoff’s volunteer fire service, at times fighting fires in his hometown alongside his father, Tom, a former Port Authority supervisor at the World Trade Center, who was also a borough volunteer firefighter.

As smoke poured from the Twin Towers, Hannon strapped on his gear and headed to lower Manhattan with scores of other firefighters.

He never returned.

Hannon was among the 343 firefighters who perished, the worst day in the history of the department.

After arriving in the Bronx, Ciampo had no idea so many FDNY firefighters were missing — including Hannon. Hours later, after arriving at the 16-acre parcel that would come to be known as Ground Zero, Ciampo heard about his younger friend.

For weeks, Ciampo tried to keep himself busy by working 24-hour shifts at Ground Zero, digging through the rubble and retrieving human remains and victims’ personal items.

“Time got lost at Ground Zero,” he said. “You’d be there for a couple of days, then back to the firehouse, then back to Ground Zero.”

But no amount of work could erase the sadness – especially coming to the realization that Hannon and so many others were gone.

“It was unbelievable,” Ciampo said. “You could never imagine. You would go down day after day. In the early days, we were all expecting to go down two floors and find 10 people alive. We’re a department that rescues people. We’ve always been able to find somebody alive.”

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But Ciampo found only death.

One day, Ciampo left Ground Zero and drove to Wyckoff – and knocked on the door of Hannon’s parents.

“I felt I needed to apologize,” Ciampo said. “I’m sorry I made Dana follow his dream. He wanted to be like me. He wanted to be that big-city fireman. There is something about what we do. He was doing what he dreamed. But nobody knew this was coming. I felt very bad inside. He was the young man I mentored. He wanted to live his dream.”

Ciampo remembers the tears and Hannon’s parents embracing him. There was little to say — certainly no words that could wipe away the pain.

Months later, Ciampo was promoted to lieutenant. Now a respected FDNY fire safety instructor, Ciampo is often invited to teach around the nation. Each time he finishes a class, he passes out cards or pins that commemorate Hannon and other firefighters who were lost on Sept. 11, 2001.

“You can’t forget about it,” Ciampo said. “A piece of me was lost that day.”

Five portraits of lives forever changed by 9/11 (4)

The Soldier

James Egan had just finished an early workout with 100 other newly minted Army lieutenants on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. As he walked from a barracks at Fort Benning, Georgia, a veteran colonel called everyone together.

Egan, then 22 and a Glen Rock native who had graduated from Rowan University only three months earlier as an ROTC cadet, clearly remembers the colonel’s words.

“Everything is different now,” the colonel said. “Make no mistake about it, we’re at war.”

Egan felt his mind and emotions race. Then the colonel added a line that would haunt him in the years to come.

“Some of you guys are not going to come home,” the colonel said.

“That turned out to be true,” said Egan, now 37 and living in Hawthorne after resigning from the Army in 2012.

Young officers like Egan found themselves at the vortex of the war on terrorism that spread from the hills of Afghanistan to the vexing and ultimately misinformed search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – to even Africa and other parts of the Middle East. They were young, smart, full of energy and willing to take the battle to the enemy.

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Egan left Fort Benning for special training with the elite Army Ranger special-operations force. Afterward, he was assigned to the fabled 1st Cavalry Division.

By April 2004, he found himself on the narrow, dusty streets of Baghdad, an intelligence officer with a combat battalion.

On Palm Sunday, the unit took its first casualties. Eight U.S. soldiers died. Four dozen were wounded. It was the worst day for the 1st Cav since Vietnam. And it was also a turning point in the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

No longer was American strategy focused solely on nation-building and trying to make friends with Iraqi people. The ambush of the 1st Cavalry Division in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad is now viewed by historians as the moment Iraq became a battle against an insurgency.

Egan lost a close friend that day. A few weeks later, he lost another. A few months after that, he learned that his friend from Fort Benning, Lt. Anthony Odierno — the son of the decorated Army general from Morris Plains who would eventually become commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq — lost his left arm in another ambush.

As an intelligence officer, it was Egan’s job to interview captured Iraqis for clues about when the next attack might take place. Not long after the Palm Sunday bloodbath, Egan looked into the eyes of a captured Iraqi leader from Sadr City.

Egan felt the man knew plenty about insurgent plans for other attacks against U.S. soldiers — certainly more than he seemed willing to divulge.

Egan felt his temper rise. He thought of his friends who had been killed. Alone in a room with the man at the U.S. base, Egan remembers shouting and threatening to turn the man over to Iraqi government authorities — a move that would probably result in torture, perhaps death.

The man started to weep.

Egan stopped.

“I saw a side of myself that I hated, and I didn’t want to be that person,” Egan said. “I wasn’t raised like that. It just kind of shows you how confusing and ugly war is.”

Egan walked away and returned with water and food for the man. Then he let the man pray.

“It was like this epiphany,” Egan remembers.

So began Egan’s slow, thoughtful questioning of the U.S. involvement in Iraq – and his own place in the Army.

He did not become an anti-war protester. Far from it. After returning to America and leaving the regular Army as a captain, Egan enlisted in the New Jersey National Guard.

“I missed the military,” he said.

In 2008, Egan was back in Iraq – this time as the commander of a National Guard detachment from the Teaneck Armory – Foxtrot Company — that was assigned to Camp Bucca in the southern Iraq desert, a vast, sandy, treeless prison camp with rows of barbed-wire fences and guard towers where some 12,000 Iraqi insurgents were held.

What Egan did not know at the time – nor did Pentagon officials – was that Camp Bucca and its volatile collection of insurgents would be the launching pad for the ISIS terrorist network.

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Egan set up a system of not only respecting the customs and religious traditions of the Iraqis that Foxtrot’s soldiers supervised, but he organized weekly meetings where he sat down inside the wire fences – unarmed – and talked with Iraqi leaders.

And then he came home.

Egan resigned his Army commission in 2012. He used his savings to buy a home in Hawthorne. He married – then separated. He plunged into a civilian career with a surgical supplies firm.

But his thoughts frequently turn to Iraq.

Why did he go? What did he accomplish? Were the sacrifices – especially the deaths of his friends – worth it? Will America ever bring its soldiers home?

Egan penned his thoughts in a private journal. Later, he was invited to speak to a men’s retreat at his boyhood Catholic parish.

The experience became another epiph¬any for him. In his 6,700-word speech that he still turns to as a way of reflecting on his soldier’s life, he recounted the pain of losing fellow soldiers – of how “blood poured out into the dry sand like water” and asking himself: “Where the hell is God?”

He explained how he came to question his decisions in Iraq and “second-guessing targets I had recommended, missions that came up empty or had soldiers get injured or killed.” And then he ended with a snippet of advice for his audience: “I just hope that you can remember that life is precious,” he said, adding: “I hope that you can remember as a leader to be vulnerable.”

On a recent morning, Egan sat in a coffee shop in Ridgewood and tried to make sense of what America has endured in the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks.

“It’s this never-ending sort of war,” he said. “It becomes numb. People forget it’s going on. It becomes the background. But soldiers are still going over there. I had a passion for it when I started. I just wanted so much to serve. Not that I don’t want to serve anymore. It’s just like the cause doesn’t seem as relevant and not as transparent and clear for me.”

He paused and shook his head.

“I lost too many friends and I don’t know why.”

Five portraits of lives forever changed by 9/11 (5)

The Widow

Ron and Kristen Breitweiser had a secret nickname for each other.

“Hi Sweets,” Ron would announce as he walked in the door of the couple’s home in Atlantic Highlands at the end of each workday.

“Hi Sweets,” Kristen remembers answering.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the nickname vanished forever.

Ron, 39, who grew up in Rutherford, was killed in the collapse of the north tower, where he worked on the 97th floor as senior vice president for the Fiduciary Trust brokerage house.

Kristen — who grew up in Manasquan, where her father served as mayor for 20 years, and met her husband playing beach volleyball in Sea Girt — remembers trying to juggle a choice.

She could grieve privately, nursing her wounded soul and trying to raise the couple’s 2-year-old daughter, Caroline. Or she could push to find out how a group of Islamist extremists could catch America’s elaborate and expensive intelligence services so flat-footed and pull off the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history.

Breitweiser knew how to ask tough questions. She was an attorney. But she had never fought her own government and knew little about international terrorism, the politics of Washington, the media and the subtle techniques of persuading an immovable and secretive federal bureaucracy to unlock its secrets.

She quickly learned.

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Breitweiser, who is now 45, joined with a group of four other 9/11 widows in calling on Congress to investigate the attacks, often leaving their children with baby sitters, piling into a car and driving to Washington for the day, sometimes even changing their clothes in the car if they were short on time.

When Congress set too many limits on its investigation, the women – who dubbed themselves “the Jersey Girls” – turned on the White House. What resulted in 2003 was the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, led by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean.

Today, Kean credits Breitweiser and the other women with playing a key role in not only extracting information from federal officials but also persuading Congress and the White House to offer more time and money for the 9/11 Commission to complete its work.

“Every time I needed something, I called them,” Kean said recently.

Breitweiser, the most vocal of the group, does not feel triumphant, however.

As the women campaigned for more openness from U.S. intelligence agencies, the Pentagon and the White House, they were also targeted for criticism.

Right-wing radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh called Breitweiser a Democratic operative. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News said the women were leftists. Conservative author Ann Coulter called them “self-obsessed women” who seem to be “enjoying their husbands’ deaths.”

When the 9/11 Commission published its finding in a 2004 best-selling book, Breitweiser labeled it “an utterly hollow report.”

Today, Breitweiser has not backed down.

“It’s been 15 years and not one person has been held accountable,” she said recently while sitting in her home in New York. “I want justice, too. I’ve waited 15 years. My husband was murdered with 3,000 people and not one person has been held accountable. How is that possible? This is the United States of America.”

The political transformation of Breitweiser did not come easy. Nor does it show any signs of disappearing.

Breitweiser emerged this summer as a leading – and highly vocal – force in ultimately successful efforts to compel the White House to disclose a 28-page report which indicated that two of the hijackers were helped by several Saudis living in the U.S. and had links to their government.

Breitweiser is still leading efforts to force Congress to pass a special law that allows U.S. citizens to file lawsuits against Saudi Arabia for its alleged role in the 9/11 attacks. But she is dismayed that her government – or more Americans – do not support her.

“It’s been 15 years of frustration,” she said. “It’s really hard. It’s soul-crushing.”

Breitweiser now devotes much of her time to raising her daughter, Caroline, now 17. She moved from New Jersey to escape the reminders of the happy life she shared with the husband she called Sweets.

“He was the sweetest guy,” she said. “He was 6 feet tall, light brown hair, blue sparkly eyes, a broad, open kind of smile. He came home with a smile on his face.”

“I just couldn’t live there anymore,” she said of New Jersey. “I couldn’t go past the market where we got our egg sandwiches. And I couldn’t go near the woods where we walked every night. I didn’t want to be near Spring Lake Beach, where we used to walk on the boardwalk. I didn’t want the reminders. Maybe some people would say that’s not coming to terms with it. To me it’s like not opening the raw wound every single hour of every single day.”

Breitweiser does not tell many people in her new community – not even close girlfriends – that Ron was killed on 9/11 or that she continues to play such a prominent role in trying to ferret out more information about the attacks.

“My husband did not need to die; 3,000 people did not need to die,” she said. “My little girl might know what a dad is.”

As she walked through her home on a recent summer day, Breitweiser opened the drawer of a dresser. “This is the 9/11 drawer,” she said, pulling out a thick sheaf of papers, with pages marked by multicolored tabs.

She stood up and leaned against a door post as Caroline walked by.

Breitweiser smiled.

“I still believe America is the best place in the world,” she said. “But I think sometimes America herself forgets that.”

Five portraits of lives forever changed by 9/11 (6)

The Grandparents

You won’t find James Zadroga’s name on the official list of the dead from the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s an oversight – perhaps even an insult – his parents want to fix.

Zadroga, who grew up in North Arlington, became a decorated New York City police detective. Hours after the Twin Towers collapsed, he rushed to the seven-story mountain of rubble that came to be known as “the pile” to hunt for survivors or the remains of the dead.

Zadroga — whose wife was pregnant with the couple’s first child — stayed three weeks at the pile, roughly 500 hours.

It was said that he slept a few hours a day in a tent at the site. Otherwise, he was on his feet, climbing through the twisted steel and broken concrete.

He was also poisoning himself.

What Zadroga — and, indeed, thousands of others at Ground Zero — did not know is that the plumes of smoke rising from the rubble were laced with deadly pollutants. In the early days, almost no one had any protection, except perhaps a few surgical masks.

The air smelled of death and burnt plastics. But a variety of officials – notably former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who was then was head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency — made a point of declaring the air in lower Manhattan safe to breathe.

Fast forward to Jan. 5, 2006.

Zadroga was staying at his parent’s retirement home in Little Egg Harbor, officially designated as too sick to work as a police detective. He could barely breathe – and then only with the help of an oxygen tank.

Zadroga was also trying to care for Tyler Ann, who had recently celebrated her third birthday. His wife, Rhonda, had died unexpectedly two years earlier from a heart attack, leaving him to raise the little girl alone.

Zadroga got up to fetch his daughter a drink. But as he walked across the room, he collapsed and died. He was 34.

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A report by Dr. Gerard Breton, the Ocean County medical examiner who performed an autopsy that day, said Zadroga’s lungs were caked with all manner of pollutants that are similar to building materials. His official death certificate, filed with the state Department of Health and Senior Services, said he suffered from “pneumonitis” with a “history of exposure to toxic fumes and dust.”

The certificate also says his death was an “accident.”

Zadroga’s parents, Linda and Joseph, shake their heads in disgust as they try to make sense of their son’s death, and go lovingly about the unanticipated task of raising his only child.

The NYPD refused to acknowledge that James Zadroga died from inhaling Ground Zero pollutants and denied him the official funeral due a cop killed in the line of duty. It was left to Bergen County police to assemble a band for his service at a North Arlington funeral home and the rows of officers that generally line the streets after an officer dies on the job.

The Zadrogas had counted on being grandparents, drifting slowly into retirement at their Jersey Shore home with the fishing dock and the sunrises that glow across the Ocean County wetlands. Linda is 70. Joe, who retired as North Arlington’s police chief almost 20 years ago and then taught at the Bergen County Police Academy for several more years, is 69.

But now they are full-time parents to Tyler Ann, now 14 and starting her first year of high school.

They do this gladly, they say. But they also wonder whether their son’s death could have been prevented if doctors and administrators – all the smart people in charge of Ground Zero – might have taken a better whiff of the foul air there and raised more questions about its dangerous dust.

“I just sit here at night and cry,” said Linda on a recent morning in Little Egg Harbor. “I have to be strong for Tyler Ann.”

It’s been more than a decade since Jim Zadroga died, 15 years since the 9/11 attacks. And while Congress voted last December to extend a federal law named after Zadroga to guarantee federal payments for health care for Ground Zero workers for the next 75 years, there was hardly universal support.

A number of conservative Republicans, including Rep. Scott Garrett of Wantage, sharply criticized the law. But under pressure from police and firefighters, Garrett and many other Republicans came around to endorse it.

Also deeply painful for Joe and Linda Zadroga is the failure to officially list James – along with what authorities believe to be several hundred other Ground Zero workers who have since died — as one of 9/11’s victims at the official memorial and museum in lower Manhattan.

“We’re angry,” said Joe, sitting with Linda at the kitchen table.

Tied to a dock outside their home, Joe’s fishing skiff bobbed with the incoming tide. Linda’s fingers caressed a pendant she wears around her neck – a replica of her son’s NYPD police badge.

“He was my fishing buddy,” said Joe of his son. “I still think he goes fishing with me once in a while.”

“He was a free spirit,” said Linda.

“He loved being a cop,” Joe continued. “He was the kind of guy who could sit down with somebody and within five minutes would know their life story.”

Joe and Linda smiled as they recounted the memories of their son – smiling even more as Tyler Ann walked into the kitchen, announcing that she was waiting for a phone call from a friend.

But the smiles and fond reminiscing are inevitably still framed by the memory of how their son died – and the slow acknowledgment by officials in Washington and New York about the cause of his death.

The couple does not plan join the hundreds of other victims’ relatives today in lower Manhattan for the reading of names of the dead from 9/11 — almost 3,000 in all, from the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the hijacked jetliner that crashed in Pennsylvania.

“They read all those names,” said Linda. “Our son’s name is not there.”

Five portraits of lives forever changed by 9/11 (2024)
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Introduction: My name is Geoffrey Lueilwitz, I am a zealous, encouraging, sparkling, enchanting, graceful, faithful, nice person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.