In memory of

John F. Connolly

1959 2024
The Years AfterNovember 13, 2024

Died of it afterward.

United States of America

Their life

With heavy hearts, we announce the passing of our beloved “Bingo,” father, grandfather “GPop,” uncle, and friend. John Connolly Sr., 65, of Staten Island, passed away peacefully on November 13, 2024. John succumbed to 9/11-related cancer which he acquired while he assisted his fellow brothers at Ground Zero following the September 11th terrorist attacks. John was a Staten Island native, born in Dongan Hills on August 29, 1959, to the late James and Elizabeth Connolly. John graduated from New Dorp High School in 1977. He went on to become one of New York’s Bravest in 1989 when he joined the FDNY. He started his career in Brooklyn at Ladder 156 at Kings Highway before transferring to Ladder 80 in Staten Island. John was a proud firefighter for 13 years before retiring in 2002. John found great joy in the simple pleasures of life, whether it was sharing a slice at Lee’s Tavern, where friends became family, or volunteering his time on the board of directors of the Staten Island Little League. He took immense pride in watching his sons grow up on the baseball field. Every Thursday was reserved for golf, a game he loved, especially when played with his friends at Linkside Golf Club. These moments, spent with loved ones and doing what he enjoyed, were a true reflection of the kind and generous soul he was. He was predeceased by his high school sweetheart and loving wife of 38 years, Jeanne; his beloved son, Michael; his parents, James and Elizabeth; and his brother, Patrick. John is survived by his loving children, John Jr., James, Joseph, and Thomas; his daughters-in-law, Megan, Francesca, and Krystn; his grandchildren, Gia, Sofia, John III,

and Joseph Jr.; mother-in-law, Jeanne Lorenzo; aunt, Joanne Maloney; brother, James; sister and brother-in-law, Lisa and Benny D’Amato; and nieces and nephews, Julieann and Frank, Erica and Dennis. He also leaves behind his four-legged, furry son, Champ.

How they died

Firefighter of the Fire Department of the City of New York, who died of an illness from the rescue and recovery at the World Trade Center. The department added the name to its World Trade Center Memorial Wall at the ceremony of 09 September 2025. He died on 13 November 2024, aged 65. This record was held back from the first pass because requiem already holds someone of the same first and last name. That person is not this person - reviewed and decided on 26 September 2026.

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.

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September 11, 2001

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.

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Media

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