The 9/11 firefighter whose death went uncounted
The merciless
ring of the wall-mounted telephone forced Arnold Roma out of the kind of heavy
sleep that only his 12-hour hospital shifts could lull him into. He’d only been
home from work for five hours, anyway.
Squinting
against the morning sunlight threatening to consume his Staten Island living
room, the then-49-year-old pulled the corded phone to his ear and, before he
could even open his mouth to say hello, was greeted by piercing sirens on the
other end.
“A plane just
hit the World Trade Center!” a voice bellowed. It was his son, Keith, yelling
into the receiver over the horns and chugging engine of a firetruck.
The father – a
nurse, volunteer firefighter and retired NYPD officer – stiffened for an
instant as fond memories of running calls with his son and riding on the truck
at the New Jersey fire company they volunteered at together flashed in his
mind.
He was awake
now.
“Dad, they’re
going to need everybody,” 27-year-old Keith said. “You better get down here.”
“Thanks, I’ll
meet you there,” Roma replied.
But that promise
would never be fully realized. Roma hung the phone in its cradle, not knowing
it was the last time he would ever speak to his son.
Roma arrived at
the World Trade Center while both towers stood defiantly tall, each pierced by
Boeing 767s, bleeding with jet fuel and spewing smoke that promised
to eventually bring them down. Keith was somewhere inside the North Tower, his
father knew. His son had been working that morning at Patrol 2, a firehouse
only blocks from the World Trade Center, as a New York Fire Patrolman.
For nearly two
centuries, New York had had two organizations responding to fires across the
city: the New York City Fire Department and the lesser-known New York Fire Patrol, a now-defunct private
fire salvage corps that worked intimately alongside the FDNY but remained a
separate entity. To a bystander, the only difference between them was the color
of their helmets, either red or black.
On September 11,
2001, those helmets became more than a distinction between two fire
organizations. For Roma, they became a compass in the search for his son and,
eventually, the reason Keith would never be counted in one of the most
recognizable numbers in the history of the attacks.
At the World
Trade Center, a fire chief told Roma to set up a triage area in the South
Tower. Once a fire patrolman himself, he looked around the sea of black FDNY
helmets, none of the scattered flashes of Fire Patrol red being his son.
I’ll get back to
Keith, I know, he told himself.
New York
Fire Patrol and FDNY rigs at the scene near ground zero
Courtesy Roma family
He turned,
running toward the lobby, dodging falling shards of glass and plummeting bodies
of trapped workers jumping to escape – and to certain death – from 90 stories
up. He was mere feet away when the South Tower started collapsing around him.
Roma was
engulfed in concrete, blinded by debris, and inclined to believe he was still
alive only because he could hear the choking screams echoing around him.
Still without
his sight, he dug himself out of the crumbled fragments and joined another
group, battered and sobbing, working to escape the wreckage. He gave his
protective coat to a civilian to cover her exposed skin, and took turns helping
carry an FDNY firefighter whose broken femur was jutting through his overalls.
Keith’s fire
company had to have seen what just happened, Roma thought
as he was hoisted into an ambulance. I hope they got the heck away from
here.
But Keith
hadn’t.
Keith carried North Tower workers to safety. Then he disappeared
Fire Patrol 2
Lt. John Sheehan, Keith Roma and driver Joe Krasko drove their rig from the
firehouse on West 3rd Street to the World Trade Center, and the lieutenant
radioed other patrol units to respond when he saw the smoke billowing from the
North Tower.
From across the
city, more than a dozen patrolmen descended onto what would become Ground Zero
and helped put out fires, rescued
trapped civilians and evacuated the towers. Inside the North Tower
lobby, Keith and Sheehan joined firefighters forcing open elevator doors and
guiding workers down the stairs.
“I witnessed
Keith carry at least a half a dozen people to safety,” Sheehan said. “Bringing
them down steps, handing them off to cops or EMTs.”
Then, standing
about 10 feet from Keith, Sheehan heard what sounded like a freight train, and
everything went black. The South Tower had fallen, creating a blinding wind
tunnel in the North lobby.
He yelled for
Keith. No answer.
Again, he
screamed. Nothing.
When the air
cleared enough to see, Keith was gone.
New York
Fire Patrol 2 sits parked next to an FDNY rescue unit at Ground Zero.
Courtesy Roma family
A wall of debris
stood between Sheehan and the place where Keith had stood. Sheehan escaped the
lobby, bleeding from the head, and told fellow patrolmen Keith was still
inside.
As they turned
to run toward the North Tower, it came down. Of the 16 patrolmen who responded
that day, Keith was the only fatality.
In the weeks
that followed, at least one member of the Fire Patrol family could always be
seen looking for their missing brother at Ground Zero, Sheehan, now 70 and
retired from the fire service, told CNN.
Roma, Keith’s
father, spent three days in the hospital after 9/11 with intense breathing
difficulties, temporary blindness from debris and a broken arm, wishing each
night that tomorrow would finally be the day he heard from his son. Once
released, he didn’t even stop at home to change clothes. He went straight back
to Ground Zero, still without word from Keith.
There, Roma
assumed a new, nightmarish job: digging for his son’s body. He retired
prematurely from his nursing job at the hospital and began spending 12 hours a
day, 7 days a week tossing aside any movable block of concrete on the north end
of the pile looking for Keith – despite his own injuries from the attack.
It would be 104
days before Roma finally saw his son again.
Keith Roma's red
Fire Patrol helmet
Courtesy Roma
family
On Christmas Eve
2001, rescuers discovered Keith stories below where the North Tower once stood,
after sifting through the 1.8-million-ton pile of steel columns, shattered
glass, computers, concrete, stray office supplies and human remains left behind
after hijacked planes tore through the two towers defining the Manhattan
skyline.
Keith was found
among a group of civilians, who rescuers believed he had been escorting to
safety when the towers came down.
It became
tradition after 9/11 that when a deceased firefighter was identified in the
rubble, his unit would honor him by carrying him out. Sheehan and
other men of Patrol 2 got the call and descended the long ramp, several stories
deep into the debris pile, and helped bring Keith back to the top.
“I mean, it was
Christmas, and it was probably one of the worst things I had ever experienced
in my life,” Sheehan said.
In the fire
service, he explained, Christmas shifts were always busy.
“But this – this
was something else. It was just horrible,” Sheehan said. “But he deserved the
honor.”
At the top of
the pile, Roma helped bear his son’s lifeless body – still clad in his Fire
Patrol coat and suspendered trousers – across Ground Zero and into an
ambulance.
After more than
three months encased in wreckage and rubble, Keith didn’t look the same, but
Roma didn’t need to see the wallet or ID in his pockets to know it was his son.
He just knew.
Roma took one
last lights-and-sirens ride with Keith that day, clutching his son’s red
helmet, now soiled by debris. As they drove, a familiar solemn tune filled the
New York streets dotted with firehouses, their intercoms blaring four sets of
five strikes of a bell – a signal to honor a firefighter who was killed in the
line of duty. Roma then personally unloaded his son at the 30th Street morgue.
But for Roma,
the agony for his missing son did not end that day. It only changed, evolving
into an entirely new – and even longer – search for answers.
For 25 years,
Roma has moved through a strange ritual of watching the country remember the
September 11 attacks and honoring its heroes on each anniversary but without
his son’s name part of the number everyone knows.
343
New York
City Fire Department firefighters march up 5th Avenue in the St. Patrick's Day
Parade carrying a banner signifying 343, the number representing the FDNY
firefighters killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Ramin Talaie/Corbis Historical/Getty Images
343. The number
quickly became part of the national vocabulary, printed on memorials, spoken at
ceremonies and repeated every September as the number of FDNY firefighters who
died at the World Trade Center.
Indeed, Keith
was not an FDNY firefighter. He was a New York Fire Patrolman and New Jersey
volunteer firefighter. So, when the FDNY counted its dead – which also included
an EMT, paramedic and chaplain – the 27-year-old was left out.
For a quarter
century, that distinction has followed Roma, who has called, written, argued
and begged for his son to be recognized alongside the FDNY firefighters whose
fate he shared.
“Every waking
day of my life the number upsets me,” Roma told CNN.
Despite dying
after responding to the call, helping to stretch hose and carry victims to
safety, Keith’s status as a patrolman has meant his name is absent from the
memorial that stretches along Ten House on
Liberty Street, the closest firehouse to the Twin Towers, or on the black marble monument inside the city’s
fire museum that photographed the 343 heroes, and his name is scantly uttered
during 9/11 tribute services across the country.
“September 11
brought so many heroes to the forefront, and we continue to mourn them all,”
Amanda Farinacci, FDNY Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, told CNN in
an emailed statement. “The number 343 maintained by the FDNY for decades comes
from the number of active members of the FDNY who were killed in the World
Trade Center attacks.”
Roma believes the
number should be 344, but more than anything, he just wants his son’s heroism
to be remembered.
“If it wasn’t
for my family’s fight and the guys on the Fire Patrol, Keith’s memory would
have been just tossed away,” Roma said.
He said: “If
they just included him, the world would know that he died a hero.”
Fire Patrol was the precursor to the FDNY
New York
Fire Patrol
New York City Fire Museum
Before there was
the New York Fire Patrol or FDNY, there were men with bags.
When a fire tore
through a building in New York, there was more to worry about than the flames.
Smoke could ruin furniture, water might destroy merchandise and whatever
survived the fire could still be lost in the rescue chaos that typically
followed.
So men began
showing up with canvas bags, blankets and a peculiar assortment of tools, ready
to save whatever they could as part of a tradition dating back to the 1700s.
The first half
of the 19th century brought the earliest traces of what would become the New
York Fire Patrol, as volunteer fire-salvage and policing corps evolved into
increasingly organized operations, according to Timothy Regan, author of
“Images of America: New York Fire Patrol.” By 1835, the Association of Fire
Insurance Companies had hired four men to attend to every fire across the city
and protect the property at risk.
Their mission
was practical, if somewhat charmingly literal: Get inside, get the valuables out
and keep them from becoming an insurance claim.
A New
York Fire Patrol patch.
New York City Fire Museum
The men,
pocketing a $250 annual salary, became the pioneering New York Fire Patrolmen,
and thus the first paid fire service members in all of New York City. Their
wagons carried brooms, buckets and protective covers. It would be another 30
years before New York abolished its separate volunteer fire companies and
created a paid city fire department – the beginning of what became the FDNY.
Fire salvage
corps popped up across the country. In New York, the “patroleos,” as they were
affectionately called, kept riding to fires in their own trucks, from their own
firehouses, alongside FDNY firefighters for nearly two centuries. Many FDNY
captains and lieutenants – and at least one legendary commissioner –
got their start in the fire service at New York Fire Patrol.
To a bystander,
the difference between the groups was nearly impossible to see. Both wore black
turnout coats and pants marked with high-visibility stripes, steel-toed boots
and breathing apparatuses. Both answered the same calls around the clock and
ran toward burning buildings.
For most, they
were distinguishable only by the color of their helmets, as FDNY donned black
ones, and the New York Fire Patrol wore red.
“You go back and
look at any New York fire footage, you’ll see the red helmets,” Roma told CNN.
But the line
between salvage man and firefighter could become especially thin once a
building was burning. Patrolmen entered the same smoke-filled rooms and faced
many of the same dangers as the firefighters beside them, helping stretch hose
and forcing open doors to perform lifesaving rescues.
And like many
FDNY firefighters throughout the years, some patroleos never came home.
Thirty-one New
York Fire Patrolmen died over the organization’s history, including Keith Roma.
A 25-year fight with no clear end
Two
American flags fly as firemen, patrolmen and rescuers in red, white, black
helmets work side by side at Ground Zero in the early morning September 14,
2001.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images
Arnold Roma
first heard the number 343 in the days after 9/11, while he was digging through
the ruins at Ground Zero searching for his son. A list of missing firefighters
had circulated among FDNY officials on the night of September 11 before
eventually making its way to the rank-and-file.
“People were
coming up to me thinking Keith was off that day because he wasn’t on the list,
so he must have been okay,” Roma said. Because of the closeness of the two
groups, many in the fire service assumed any missing Fire Patrol members would
have been included in FDNY’s list, he said.
Former FDNY
Commissioner Sal Cassano, who was, at the time, the department’s assistant
chief of operations, said on the night of the attacks he began calling
firehouses in trying to determine who had been riding firetrucks that morning
and who was still missing.
“Our first count
was over 500,” Cassano said. As firefighters were located at nearby hospitals
or otherwise accounted for, the number fell and the department settled on 343.
But no one
called the Fire Patrol firehouses asking if they were missing anyone.
“To be honest,
we weren’t thinking of it,” Cassano said. “We lost people, 98 pieces of
apparatus — that’s engines, ladders, ambulances — so we had our hands full.”
Roma said he
immediately began calling FDNY officials, including Cassano, asking why Keith
wasn’t included. Cassano told him there was no way to add him to the
department’s count.
“It’s a
conversation that we had at headquarters, there was a lot of teeth gnashing
saying, ‘We should count Fire Patrol,’” Cassano said. “But there were also
retired members that were lost, and people wanted to include them in.”
“The powers that
be at that time said, ‘No. The number is going to be the number of members of
the New York City Fire Department that were active that day, working,’” Cassano
said. “There was a lot of consternation in the room.”
Roma didn’t know
it then, but the 343 number would become a haunt, mobilizing him into decades
of fighting, and of being told no.
The FDNY
declined CNN’s request for an interview or to elaborate on its statement that
only active-duty members of the agency are included in the count.
25 years later,
undeterred, Roma continues to appeal to the FDNY and others, so they may
acknowledge Keith’s work as a firefighter on that day, resulting in the
ultimate sacrifice.
“We work with
them, we die with them, and they’ve acknowledged all of that, but the biggest
thing, they won’t acknowledge him a fireman,” he said.
Medals
honoring Roma's service.
Courtesy Roma family
While not
including Keith in their official tally, the department did later bestow upon
him the FDNY Fireman’s Medal of Supreme Sacrifice. His bereaved father also
points to other posthumous recognition, including a line-of-duty death medal
from the International Association of Fire Fighters union – in which Keith was
enrolled – and a 9/11 Heroes Medal of Valor and certificate from the White
House declaring Keith’s death occurred “while serving a public safety agency as
a firefighter,” signed by then-President George W. Bush.
“Keith was just
a good guy at heart,” Sheehan, Keith’s lieutenant at Patrol 2, said. “He always
gave more of himself – he was early for his shifts, even eating dinner with the
guys when he was off that night and was just a pleasure at work.”
The 25th
anniversary of the terrorist attack has brought a new wave of commemoration,
with planners scaling up events to make the milestone more impactful. The Romas
fear that, once again, they will have no way to honor their son on the same
terms as families of the other 343.
“I want Arnold
(Roma) to keep fighting because if it was me, I would have been fighting ‘til I
had no more breath,” Cassano said.
Sheehan said he
has never been comfortable with the number 343, which he believes makes the
death toll too definitive and leaves out scores of other sacrifices.
“I would be the
first one to go with 344,” Sheehan said. “But there’s so much focused on the
number 343, but what about the hundreds of other guys that died of 9/11 cancer
and illness, who were also in that building, including other Fire Patrol guys?”
Sheehan himself
has battled several cancers as a result of 9/11 and must visit the World Trade
Center Health Program multiple times a year.
Arnold Roma also
goes in for regular checkups to monitor his decreased lung function, stomach
problems, post-traumatic stress, anxiety and other health issues developed
after the attacks: “I relive this thing 100 times a day,” he said.
So, if nowhere
else, Keith is honored every day inside the Pennsylvania home where Roma now
lives with his wife. Keith’s red helmet, still covered in soot, and a
photograph of him grinning, sit proudly on display.
“Every day at
3:44 p.m., I come into the bedroom, and I salute him and the number 344,” he
said. “I’ve done it for the last 25 years, and I won’t stop now.”
Fire Patrol “best-kept secret in New York”
Facade of
New York Fire Patrol 2's firehouse with the "Fire Patrol" moniker and
carving of the god of speed, Mercury, visible
Alamy Stock Photo
Over its legacy
spanning three centuries, the Patrol’s place in New York’s firefighting world
became so intertwined with the FDNY that its history even became part of the
department’s traditions.
Captain Albert
S. Johnston, the son of one of the four original members of the Fire Patrol,
received three FDNY
lifesaving medals during his 40-year career with the corps in the early 1900s.
The award could be given to members of either the FDNY or Fire Patrol. It was
later renamed in Johnston’s honor, and the Albert S. Johnston Medal is still
awarded to FDNY firefighters today.
In 1968,
patrolman Ed Pospisil of Fire Patrol 3 led the effort to locate the bodies of
12 FDNY firefighters killed in a raging East 23rd Street fire the year before.
Some were men he had spent his career working beside.
For his work,
Pospisil received the highest award a patrolman could: the FDNY Albert S.
Johnston Medal, named for a Fire Patrolman, but seldom given to one.
“Working patrol
was the best job I ever had,” Pospisil, now an 85-year-old retired Hartford
fire chief, said. “Any of them still alive would say the same thing.”
For the men who
worked there, Fire Patrol was not simply an insurance company’s salvage
operation. It was a firehouse with bells, trucks and traditions. It had old men
who taught young ones how the job was done.
Craig Buccieri
knew all about firehouses long before he ever put on patrol turnouts.
In 1973, after
years hanging around his father’s firehouse as a boy, listening to the bells
and watching the firefighters come and go, he took the test, did the training
and joined Patrol 2.
“I grew up going
to firehouses, I could count the bells in my sleep, and a lot of those guys on Patrol
were like brothers to me,” Buccieri said. He would eventually leave Patrol for
the FDNY, retiring as a lieutenant.
A young
Keith Roma
Courtesy Roma Family
By then, Fire
Patrol had become something much bigger than the men with canvas bags who had
first appeared at New York fires more than a century earlier.
The decades
passed in the archives, from pencil sketches of horse-drawn wagons to grainy
black-and-white photographs, then to the saturated colors of 1970s film, with
GMC Patrol firetrucks chugging through a changing New York. Through it all, the
red-helmeted Fire Patrol kept appearing in the frame, evolving with the city it
served.
Keith’s old
Patrol 2 firehouse, now privately owned, still stands in Greenwich Village,
bearing its red-brick facade and arched bay where horse-drawn wagons once
waited beneath a stone carving of Mercury, the Roman god of speed.
At its peak, the
organization employed nearly 400 patroleos across several firehouses and saved tens of millions of dollars in
property over the years, including over a thousand irreplaceable objects from a
1958 fire at the Museum of Modern Art. When Philadelphia closed the doors of
its last fire salvage company in 1962, New York Fire Patrol became the last of
its kind in the country.
But the
insurance industry’s reason for funding the Fire Patrol was becoming harder to
justify as fire departments grew more sophisticated, buildings changed and the
annual budget had climbed to roughly $8.5 million.
In 2006, the New
York Board of Fire Underwriters, the insurance conglomerate signing its checks,
decided it was no longer worth the cost. After nearly two centuries, the bells
stopped and Patrol trucks pulled out of their firehouses for the last time.
Many of the men
who had worn the uniform weren’t ready to let it disappear.
Arnold Roma
became one of the most persistent voices behind an effort to resurrect Fire
Patrol, arguing that New York had lost more than an antiquated insurance
service. It had lost a specialized force whose job was to keep fires, and the
damage they caused, from becoming worse.
The effort won
support in City Hall and Washington. In 2011, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer
announced more than $100,000 in federal funding for a proposed Staten Island
Fire Patrol program, while state legislation advanced to bring the organization
back.
But it never
did. The bill stalled, and the money never revived the group.
The Fire Patrol
is survived in photographs, old firehouse stories and the memories of the
patroleos who answered its bells.
And, for Arnold
Roma, in the fight to keep Keith’s heroism alive.
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