. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/krnewyork/20020103/lo/b_klyn_bravest_found_at_wtc_1.html
Thursday January 03 06:38 AM EST
B'klyn Bravest Found at WTC
By GREG WILSON, MICHELE MCPHEE and GREG GITTRICH
The firefighters of Ladder 118 died side by side.
Lt. Robert Regan and Firefighters Joseph Agnello and Peter Vega were found together on New Year's Day, more than three months after their last tragic run together Sept. 11.
Their final journey was photographed from a nearby Brooklyn roof, the picture capturing the tiller truck crossing the Brooklyn Bridge "into the gates of hell," as a priest from a nearby church had put it.
Six men were aboard the truck from Brooklyn Heights. Scott Davidson, the driver, was found weeks ago. Everyone else was missing until the first few hours of 2002.
They were pulled from the buried lobby of the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel, where many had sought refuge when the towers fell, Fire Department sources said.
Recovery workers believe Regan, Agnello and Vega died together in the hotel lobby, near four other firefighters and three civilians whose bodies also were recovered Tuesday.
They refused to leave one another, and they would not abandon civilians in the suffocating smoke as the towers crumbled.
"That's what he would be doing. That sounds like him," Agnello's wife, Vinnie Carla, said yesterday.
Regan's wife, Donna, has prayed daily that her husband would be found alongside his men.
"The biggest honor for him is that he was found with his guys," she said yesterday. "Bobby loved those guys. He never would have went anywhere without them."
Firehouse Lost 8
Eight firefighters from the Ladder 118/Engine 205 firehouse on Middagh St. died Sept. 11. Of the six aboard Ladder 118's tiller truck, two remain missing — Leon Smith and Vernon Cherry.
The medical examiner's office identified three other firefighters recovered between midnight and 8 a.m. on New Year's Day as Christopher Pickford of Engine 201 in Brooklyn and Charles Mendez and George Cain of Ladder 7 in Manhattan.
The body of a seventh firefighter recovered that day was not identified. But Vega's widow, Regan Grice-Vega, told the Daily News that Fire Department brass told her the body was another of the men who rode on Ladder 118's truck.
The Oct. 5 edition of the Daily News immortalized that final run. The front-page photograph, snapped from the roof of the Jehovah's Witnesses Watchtower building, shows the men heading to their deaths across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Grieving family members said yesterday that the discovery of the firefighters tore open wounds that had only begun to heal. But the pain was worth it.
"It's a mixed emotion because it dredged up the shock of Sept. 11," said Vinnie Carla Agnello. "I was just going on with my life, thinking they'd never find him."
"When they said they found him, it was reality," she said. "It hurts all over again."
Agnello's body was the first recovered early Tuesday. The heavy machines quickly came to a halt, and a group of his Ladder 118/Engine 205 brethren who happened to be digging through debris nearby were called over.
Agnello, 35, was constantly bragging about his young sons, Sal, 3, and Vincent, 1. He had been the target of good-natured ribbing about the way he rang the wrong bells in his first days at the house — leading to his nickname, Joey Bells.
As construction workers watched with their hardhats over their hearts, the firefighters carried Agnello out of the pit. They then returned to painstakingly dig for their other missing colleagues.
Using tiny shovels, they found Vega, 36, next. The resident politician of the Engine 205/Ladder 118 firehouse, he routinely debated his fellow firefighters.
About 4:30 a.m., the firefighters came upon Regan, 45. A quiet man, Regan had met his wife when she was 15, and together they had two kids — Caitlin, 15 and Brendan, 12.
His brother-in-law, Charlie Wells, retrieved Regan's wedding ring and his medallion of St. Florian, the patron saint of firefighters.
The back of the medallion is inscribed: "We love you, Caitlin, Brendan and Donna." It also carries the date 12/10/85 — the day he became a firefighter.
"I'm very happy. I don't have to think of him down there anymore," Donna Regan said as she caressed the medallion and ring.
She said she was going to wait to bury her husband until the last members of the doomed fire truck were recovered.
Engine 205 Firefighter John Sorrentino, who helped find Regan and the others, vowed to keep searching.
"We are still waiting for Vernon and Leon," he said. "It is very important to us that we've been there to get them out and carry them home." With Alice McQuillan