| Fallen Firefighter Was Realizing a Dream |
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Thomas Brick's lifelong dream was to be a firefighter.
"The only thing he ever wanted to do was to be a firefighter," Mayor Michael Bloomberg quoted Brick's mother as telling him at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where Brick died yesterday after being pulled from a warehouse fire in upper Manhattan. Brick, 30, a resident of Flushing who leaves behind two children, was the second firefighter to die in the line of duty since the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, which killed 343 firefighters. The mayor said Brick's mother, Margaret Brick, recalled that as a youngster, her son used to go to a firehouse with a family friend, "playing on the engine." According to his mother, "his greatest dream was realized after Sept. 11," the mayor said. Brick was a member of the first class to graduate from the Fire Academy after the terrorist attack. The class graduated Oct. 28, 2001. "He was part of a group of brave young men and women who were rebuilding the Fire Department after that tragic day of 9/11," Bloomberg said. Bloomberg said Brick was honored earlier this year along with five other members of Ladder Co. 36 for rescuing six people in a Manhattan fire. According to fire officials, Brick - while participating in a search and rescue mission on Jan. 6, 2002 - used a water extinguisher to confine a fire in a five-story apartment building on West 187th Street while other crew members helped six trapped tenants climb down aerial ladders to safety. Speaking of Brick's two children - daughter Madeline, 4, and son Aden, 3 - Bloomberg said: "All we will be able to tell them is that their father really was a hero." Fire Department spokesman Frank Gribbon said the members of Brick's firehouse, which houses Ladder Co. 36 and Engine Co. 95, "are all in shock." At the firehouse on Vermilyea Avenue, where a flag was flying at half-staff, a firefighter said of Brick: "He was like a kid himself. He was a good guy. He would do anything for anybody. He will be absolutely missed." Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc. |
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