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There
are many places on the Internet to post a condolence message about the
EMS personnel lost at the WTC disaster.
Won't you please do a bit more than post an online message? Send a card
to the distraught and grieving family.
We will supply an address if the family desires to have cards
sent.
(Please
note in card that no reply is necessary)
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Robert
and Eileen Cirri met when she was an emergency room
nurse and he was moonlighting as a paramedic.
"There was this weird, electric charge," Mrs.
Cirri said. She had not believed in love at first sight
until then.
It was the second marriage for both. The Cirris had a
merged family, with three of her children and three of
his, ages 17, 16, 15, 14, 13 and 12.
Lieutenant Cirri, a member of the Port Authority Police
Department, had about 10 ham radios operating at their
home in Nutley, N.J., and helped shore up the state's
emergency communications systems. One of the repeaters
he set up for the Hudson County Office of Emergency
Management was working on Sept. 11, with his voice, and
his friends are keeping it. "His voice is still
going on, as we speak," Mrs. Cirri said. "It's
still keying up every 15 minutes on that repeater, out
in space forever."
She found another remnant of him when she tried to log
on to his e-mail and found he had chosen her first name
as his password.
Lieutenant Cirri's body was found with the bodies of
four other officers and that of a woman they had been
trying to carry out in a rescue chair. |
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Lt.
Robert D. Cirri
Lt.
Robert D. Cirri, Paramedic
police officer, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
age 39
The day
of the World Trade Center attack, Eileen Cirri received a call from her
husband, Lt. Robert Cirri, a Port Authority police officer.
He said he was a couple of blocks away, saw people running and was
planning to help.
"He told me he was safe but that he couldn't watch people running
out of the building," Eileen Cirri said. "He said he needed to
go help."
Reports say Mr. Cirri gathered a group of fellow officers and led an
expedition into the North Tower to try and help people. He lost his own
life when the tower collapsed.
"I'm not surprised at all," said Lt. Paul Haggerty of the
Lyndhurst Police, one of Robert Cirri's best friends. "That's just
the type of guy he was."
From his work as a police officer to his part-time gig as a paramedic
and even his hobby as a ham radio operator, friends and family say Mr.
Cirri, a 39-year-old Nutley resident, lived to help others.
When he wasn't training other officers for the Port Authority, Mr. Cirri
spent part of his weekends as a paramedic at Hackensack University
Medical Center.
"He loved helping people and he was a good leader," Eileen
Cirri said.
Haggerty said he and Mr. Cirri started their ham radio operation as a
hobby, but that he soon realized he could help people at the same time.
Both men became a part of Jersey Coastal Emergency Services, a nonprofit
organization that monitors emergency airwaves.
"He wanted to look out for the public," Haggerty said.
Mr. Cirri was also a good father to his two children and three
stepchildren, bringing them all together on the weekends.
And his willingness to help others didn't stop with the public. Once,
one of Mr. Cirri's children began choking on a hot dog. Eileen Cirri, at
that time an emergency room nurse, lost her cool and panicked, but not
Mr. Cirri.
"He was sitting at the table, popped a piece of steak into his
mouth, calmly got up and performed the Heimlich Maneuver without missing
a beat," Eileen Cirri said. "It doesn't surprise me at all
what he did Tuesday."
Mr. Cirri is survived by his two children, Robert Jr. and Jessica, of
West New York; three stepchildren, Bianca Jerez, Francesca Jerez and
Kara Jerez of Nutley; and his parents, Maria and Dominick Cirri of
Guttenberg
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Special
Letter about all
WTC EMS LODD's
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