Sergeant Michael W. Ryan

Inscribed

National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Panel 31-W MICHAEL W RYAN

Also kept at

badge.nw ↗ Sergeant

Died of it afterward on November 5, 2007, aged 41.

United States of America

His life

Sergeant Michael Ryan died of three different forms of aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma he contracted after inhaling toxic chemicals and materials while working hundreds of hours at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

Following the attack, Sergeant Ryan worked 70 to 80 hours a week at Ground Zero for several months. He was diagnosed with his first cancer, which was caused by prolonged exposure to volatile organic compounds cataloged at Ground Zero in May 2006. He died on November 5, 2007, as a result of cancer.

Sergeant Ryan served with the New York City Police Department for 20 years.

Survived by

He is survived by his wife (a retired New York City police officer) and his four children.

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

Everything Michael W. Ryan 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 →