Detective Second Grade James M. Ward

Inscribed

National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Panel 25-WT JAMES MILTON WARD

Sergeant U.S. Army

Also kept at

badge.nw ↗ Detective salute.nw ↗ Sergeant

Also served in U.S. Army. Died of it afterward on January 17, 2022, aged 60.

United States of America

His life

Detective James Ward died as the result of cancer that he developed following his assignment to the search and recovery efforts at the World Trade Center site following the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks.

Detective Ward was a United States Army veteran and had served with the New York City Police Department for 20 years.

His story

James Milton Ward, known as Jimmy, was born and raised in New York City. He served in the United States Army from 1982 to 1985, earning the Good Conduct Medal, a Commendation Medal and the Army Service Ribbon, and left the service as a sergeant.

He joined the New York City Police Department on 15 July 1986 and was first assigned to the 44 Precinct. He went on to serve in the Organized Crime Control Bureau, the Narcotics Division, Narcotics Borough Bronx and the Organized Crime Investigation Division. He was promoted to detective third grade on 31 January 1992 and to detective second grade on 24 December 2001. His last command was the Strike Force, which handled high-level drug and gun cases, and he retired from it on 31 July 2006 after 20 years.

In retirement he moved with his family to Charlotte, North Carolina, and earned a bachelor of arts degree at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He belonged to the Charlotte 10-13 Club and the Oishi Judo Club in New York, where he held a black belt and taught martial arts. He followed the New York Giants and was a skilled gardener.

Detective Ward developed cancer from his work in the rescue and recovery effort after the World Trade Center attacks, and he died on 17 January 2022. His death was deemed in the line of duty. He was survived by his spouse of 26 years, three children, four sisters and three brothers. He was buried with military honors at Salisbury National Cemetery in Salisbury, North Carolina.

Survived by

He is survived by his wife, three children, and four sisters.

The Years After

September 11, 2001

For eight months after the towers came down, men and women worked the site. Firefighters, police, paramedics, iron workers, truck drivers, cleaners, volunteers. They breathed what was in that air, and many of them have died of it since - cancers, lung disease, illnesses that took ten years or twenty to arrive.

More people have now died of September 11th than were killed on September 11th. They are not a footnote to the day. They are the day, arriving late.

A man who walked down eighty flights and out into the street, and who died of a cancer in 2031, was killed by the same attack as the man who never got out. This gate holds them together, because the same morning took them both.

Everyone taken by The Years After →

September 11, 2001

On a clear Tuesday morning, four airliners were taken. Two were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one into the western face of the Pentagon, and one came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers and crew went forward at the cockpit door.

Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven people were killed. Three hundred and forty-three were firefighters of the New York City Fire Department. Seventy-one were law enforcement officers. Eight were paramedics and emergency medical technicians. One hundred and twenty-five died at the Pentagon, military and civilian together. The rest - some two thousand four hundred of them - had gone to work, or boarded a plane, and belonged to no service at all.

None of them began that morning as heroes. A great many of them ended it as heroes: men and women who carried strangers down stairwells, who stayed with people who could not walk, who held a door, who went back up. Four men on a flight over Pennsylvania, who had thirty minutes of telephone calls and knew what had already happened, decided where their aircraft would come down.

At Arlington, the nation set aside its own rules of eligibility and buried the Pentagon's civilian dead in national ground. It had decided that on this day the distinction did not apply.

Everyone taken by September 11, 2001 →

Media

National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Panel 25-WT

Panel 25-WT

Everything James M. Ward is tied to in the record. Scroll to zoom, drag to move, click a face or a label to open it.

No family is recorded with him yet.

What people have said 1

You are not just a name on a list to me. You are in my thoughts and prayers.

S. Vincent Anthony 11 September 2026

Everyone taken by The Years After →