The story of Danny a fire-fighter killed by a 'Jumper'. Probably the first firefighter to die that day and his death saved the lives of other fighters who by his death stopped moving into the tower that was about to collapse.
Nancy had always known that Danny Suhr, her high- school sweetheart, wanted to be a fire-fighter. Nancy was Italian-American; Danny was Irish-American. Not long before 9/11, one of Danny’s oldest and closest colleagues, Harry Ford, had died and he had invited Nancy to attend the funeral, not least because a fire-fighter’s funeral was quite an event, he'd said. Danny was very moved by Harry's death and gave Nancy instructions that, should he ever die in the line of duty, he wanted a closed coffin.
Nancy had said there wouldn't be anywhere big enough to hold a funeral for Danny, because he was widely known and popular, but he specified the Marine Park Funeral Home, and she promised.
Looking back, she wondered: did he know? Danny was a strong man, not a bully, who made everything seem like it would be okay, especially for Nancy and for his daughter, Brianna, who was two years old and about to start nursery on the morning of 9/11, but never arrived there.
Engine 216 got the call- the run, as they would say and set off to the scene, where they were directed to assemble at the command post inside the south tower. The captain, Paul Conlon, who was leading them, described how they had about 200 yards to cover. Debris was falling and people were jumping as they surveyed the scene. Danny said something like, "Let's make this quick," so they set off together in a diagonal line, when Danny was hit. As Nancy recently told me, "She came out of the sky like a torpedo." A woman had jumped or fallen, and landed on Danny. It was a freak accident, made all the more unlikely by the fact that few victims jumped or fell from the south tower. The NIST study only observed three people falling from the south tower - one at 09:30, about the time Danny was hit. His colleagues reacted quickly and carried him to the shelter of some nearby scaffolding. A photographer captured the moment they lifted him, which must have been seconds after he was struck.
He was taken by ambulance and treated by a doctor and paramedics who soon realised he was "not viable". Two of Danny's closest friends and colleagues travelled with him to Bellevue hospital. They kept yelling his name. The medic with them knew Danny's neck was broken because of the way his head moved every time they hit a bump. "Please stop staring at him," he told Danny's friends. "You're going to burn this image into your head. I want you to remember a better image."
Nancy got home that morning to find an answer phone message from Danny. "Hey babe, it's me. Just want to tell you that everything's okay. I'll talk to you later. I love you."Not long afterwards, she received a phone call from the fire department, telling her that Danny had been hurt and they were coming to take her to him. She knew then, in her heart, that he was dead.
At the hospital, the captain said: ''I'm so sorry, Nancy." It was like an out-of-body experience, she told me. Thinking of Brianna, she said: "Who's going to walk her down the aisle?" They tried to stop her seeing Danny. but she insisted, and so she was taken to him, and saw his forehead cracked in half and his cheek and nose broken. "He is going to be so mad that he broke his nose," she kept thinking. She was determined to keep her composure and not throw herself on the floor. She kissed him and whispered to him and walked out of the room. She ~ had to go home now, she said, and do the laundry. ~ Later that night she leant how Danny had died, and all she could remember thinking Was: "How horrendous for that poor person." What had been going through their mind before they jumped or fell? How horrific for those people up there to have ; to choose. Danny did not choose, but they had to.
Nancy said her life ended that day, but she ~ agreed with her father, who said it had been Danny's day to die; it was his time.
As Nancy now knew, if he had not been hit by the falling woman, he and his colleagues would all have been inside the south tower when it collapsed 29 minutes later. They would all have died. Danny might have been the first fire-fighter to die on 9/11, but he was certainly not the last. Three hundred and forty-two of his colleagues died too, most of them in the collapse of the buildings. But his death kept his friends and colleagues out of the tower and saved their lives.
Nancy considers it her good fortune that she had a body to bury when so many other fire-fighter widows had nothing. Nancy used Marine Park Funeral Home, just as Danny had wanted, but made a concession to those members of the family who wanted to see him, and left the coffin open while they prayed. Nancy watched as they started to close the coffin. Danny was such a big man that the lid wouldn't shut. and she laughed, telling me how they had to press his chest down to close it.
She told me she had never felt anger towards the woman who had killed him, quite the opposite. She had felt sympathy for her and the terrible choice that she and the other jumpers had to make.
