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Detective Michael Morales died from illnesses caused by inhaling toxic materials while partaking in the rescue and recovery efforts at the World Trade Center site, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Detective Morales had served with the New York City Police Department for 29 years and was assigned to the 122nd Precinct Detective Squad. Detective Morales had previously served with the United States Army and was a veteran of the Vietnam War and a Purple Heart recipient.
Detective Morales is survived by his wife and four children.
His story
Michael P. Morales was born in Manhattan. He served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and was awarded the Purple Heart. After his honorable discharge in 1968, he came home to New York and married his high school sweetheart, Silvia. They settled on Staten Island, where he worked as a meat inspector for the United States Department of Agriculture until he was appointed to the New York City Police Department in July 1973.
He was briefly laid off during the city's fiscal crisis and was rehired a few weeks later. In 1976 he became Community Affairs Officer for Patrol Borough Manhattan South. In 1981 he went to the detective squad of the 67 Precinct in Flatbush, Brooklyn, as an investigator, and in 1986 he moved to the Staten Island Crimes Against Persons Squad. He was promoted to detective in March 1987 and to second grade in August 1992.
Detective Morales died on 10 June 2009, one month before his 62nd birthday, of small cell lung cancer caused by his work in the rescue, recovery and clean-up after the World Trade Center attacks.
Survived by
Detective Morales is survived by his wife and 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.
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.
