The 9/11 firefighter whose death went uncounted

By Danya Gainor, CNN

(CNN) — The merciless ring of the wall-mounted telephone forced Arnold Roma out of the kind of heavy sleep that only his 12-hour hospital shifts could lull him into. He’d only been home from work for five hours, anyway.

Squinting against the morning sunlight threatening to consume his Staten Island living room, the then-49-year-old pulled the corded phone to his ear and, before he could even open his mouth to say hello, was greeted by piercing sirens on the other end.

“A plane just hit the World Trade Center!” a voice bellowed. It was his son, Keith, yelling into the receiver over the horns and chugging engine of a firetruck.

The father – a nurse, volunteer firefighter and retired NYPD officer – stiffened for an instant as fond memories of running calls with his son and riding on the truck at the New Jersey fire company they volunteered at together flashed in his mind.

He was awake now.

“Dad, they’re going to need everybody,” 27-year-old Keith said. “You better get down here.”

“Thanks, I’ll meet you there,” Roma replied.

But that promise would never be fully realized. Roma hung the phone in its cradle, not knowing it was the last time he would ever speak to his son.

Roma arrived at the World Trade Center while both towers stood defiantly tall, each pierced by Boeing 767s, bleeding with jet fuel and spewing smoke that promised to eventually bring them down. Keith was somewhere inside the North Tower, his father knew. His son had been working that morning at Patrol 2, a firehouse only blocks from the World Trade Center, as a New York Fire Patrolman.

For nearly two centuries, New York had had two organizations responding to fires across the city: the New York City Fire Department and the lesser-known New York Fire Patrol, a now-defunct private fire salvage corps that worked intimately alongside the FDNY but remained a separate entity. To a bystander, the only difference between them was the color of their helmets, either red or black.

On September 11, 2001, those helmets became more than a distinction between two fire organizations. For Roma, they became a compass in the search for his son and, eventually, the reason Keith would never be counted in one of the most recognizable numbers in the history of the attacks.

At the World Trade Center, a fire chief told Roma to set up a triage area in the South Tower. Once a fire patrolman himself, he looked around the sea of black FDNY helmets, none of the scattered flashes of Fire Patrol red being his son.

I’ll get back to Keith, I know, he told himself.

He turned, running toward the lobby, dodging falling shards of glass and plummeting bodies of trapped workers jumping to escape – and to certain death – from 90 stories up. He was mere feet away when the South Tower started collapsing around him.

Roma was engulfed in concrete, blinded by debris, and inclined to believe he was still alive only because he could hear the choking screams echoing around him.

Still without his sight, he dug himself out of the crumbled fragments and joined another group, battered and sobbing, working to escape the wreckage. He gave his protective coat to a civilian to cover her exposed skin, and took turns helping carry an FDNY firefighter whose broken femur was jutting through his overalls.

Keith’s fire company had to have seen what just happened, Roma thought as he was hoisted into an ambulance. I hope they got the heck away from here.

But Keith hadn’t.

Keith carried North Tower workers to safety. Then he disappeared

Fire Patrol 2 Lt. John Sheehan, Keith Roma and driver Joe Krasko drove their rig from the firehouse on West 3rd Street to the World Trade Center, and the lieutenant radioed other patrol units to respond when he saw the smoke billowing from the North Tower.

From across the city, more than a dozen patrolmen descended onto what would become Ground Zero and helped put out fires, rescued trapped civilians and evacuated the towers. Inside the North Tower lobby, Keith and Sheehan joined firefighters forcing open elevator doors and guiding workers down the stairs.

“I witnessed Keith carry at least a half a dozen people to safety,” Sheehan said. “Bringing them down steps, handing them off to cops or EMTs.”

Then, standing about 10 feet from Keith, Sheehan heard what sounded like a freight train, and everything went black. The South Tower had fallen, creating a blinding wind tunnel in the North lobby.

He yelled for Keith. No answer.

Again, he screamed. Nothing.

When the air cleared enough to see, Keith was gone.

A wall of debris stood between Sheehan and the place where Keith had stood. Sheehan escaped the lobby, bleeding from the head, and told fellow patrolmen Keith was still inside.

As they turned to run toward the North Tower, it came down. Of the 16 patrolmen who responded that day, Keith was the only fatality.

In the weeks that followed, at least one member of the Fire Patrol family could always be seen looking for their missing brother at Ground Zero, Sheehan, now 70 and retired from the fire service, told CNN.

Roma, Keith’s father, spent three days in the hospital after 9/11 with intense breathing difficulties, temporary blindness from debris and a broken arm, wishing each night that tomorrow would finally be the day he heard from his son. Once released, he didn’t even stop at home to change clothes. He went straight back to Ground Zero, still without word from Keith.

There, Roma assumed a new, nightmarish job: digging for his son’s body. He retired prematurely from his nursing job at the hospital and began spending 12 hours a day, 7 days a week tossing aside any movable block of concrete on the north end of the pile looking for Keith – despite his own injuries from the attack.

It would be 104 days before Roma finally saw his son again.

On Christmas Eve 2001, rescuers discovered Keith stories below where the North Tower once stood, after sifting through the 1.8-million-ton pile of steel columns, shattered glass, computers, concrete, stray office supplies and human remains left behind after hijacked planes tore through the two towers defining the Manhattan skyline.

Keith was found among a group of civilians, who rescuers believed he had been escorting to safety when the towers came down.

It became tradition after 9/11 that when a deceased firefighter was identified in the rubble, his unit would honor him by carrying him out. Sheehan and other men of Patrol 2 got the call and descended the long ramp, several stories deep into the debris pile, and helped bring Keith back to the top.

“I mean, it was Christmas, and it was probably one of the worst things I had ever experienced in my life,” Sheehan said.

In the fire service, he explained, Christmas shifts were always busy.

“But this – this was something else. It was just horrible,” Sheehan said. “But he deserved the honor.”

At the top of the pile, Roma helped bear his son’s lifeless body – still clad in his Fire Patrol coat and suspendered trousers – across Ground Zero and into an ambulance.

After more than three months encased in wreckage and rubble, Keith didn’t look the same, but Roma didn’t need to see the wallet or ID in his pockets to know it was his son. He just knew.

Roma took one last lights-and-sirens ride with Keith that day, clutching his son’s red helmet, now soiled by debris. As they drove, a familiar solemn tune filled the New York streets dotted with firehouses, their intercoms blaring four sets of five strikes of a bell – a signal to honor a firefighter who was killed in the line of duty. Roma then personally unloaded his son at the 30th Street morgue.

But for Roma, the agony for his missing son did not end that day. It only changed, evolving into an entirely new – and even longer – search for answers.

For 25 years, Roma has moved through a strange ritual of watching the country remember the September 11 attacks and honoring its heroes on each anniversary but without his son’s name part of the number everyone knows.

343

343. The number quickly became part of the national vocabulary, printed on memorials, spoken at ceremonies and repeated every September as the number of FDNY firefighters who died at the World Trade Center.

Indeed, Keith was not an FDNY firefighter. He was a New York Fire Patrolman and New Jersey volunteer firefighter. So, when the FDNY counted its dead – which also included an EMT, paramedic and chaplain – the 27-year-old was left out.

For a quarter century, that distinction has followed Roma, who has called, written, argued and begged for his son to be recognized alongside the FDNY firefighters whose fate he shared.

“Every waking day of my life the number upsets me,” Roma told CNN.

Despite dying after responding to the call, helping to stretch hose and carry victims to safety, Keith’s status as a patrolman has meant his name is absent from the memorial that stretches along Ten House on Liberty Street, the closest firehouse to the Twin Towers, or on the black marble monument inside the city’s fire museum that photographed the 343 heroes, and his name is scantly uttered during 9/11 tribute services across the country.

“September 11 brought so many heroes to the forefront, and we continue to mourn them all,” Amanda Farinacci, FDNY Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, told CNN in an emailed statement. “The number 343 maintained by the FDNY for decades comes from the number of active members of the FDNY who were killed in the World Trade Center attacks.”

Roma believes the number should be 344, but more than anything, he just wants his son’s heroism to be remembered.

“If it wasn’t for my family’s fight and the guys on the Fire Patrol, Keith’s memory would have been just tossed away,” Roma said.

He said: “If they just included him, the world would know that he died a hero.”

Fire Patrol was the precursor to the FDNY

Before there was the New York Fire Patrol or FDNY, there were men with bags.

When a fire tore through a building in New York, there was more to worry about than the flames. Smoke could ruin furniture, water might destroy merchandise and whatever survived the fire could still be lost in the rescue chaos that typically followed.

So men began showing up with canvas bags, blankets and a peculiar assortment of tools, ready to save whatever they could as part of a tradition dating back to the 1700s.

The first half of the 19th century brought the earliest traces of what would become the New York Fire Patrol, as volunteer fire-salvage and policing corps evolved into increasingly organized operations, according to Timothy Regan, author of “Images of America: New York Fire Patrol.” By 1835, the Association of Fire Insurance Companies had hired four men to attend to every fire across the city and protect the property at risk.

Their mission was practical, if somewhat charmingly literal: Get inside, get the valuables out and keep them from becoming an insurance claim.

The men, pocketing a $250 annual salary, became the pioneering New York Fire Patrolmen, and thus the first paid fire service members in all of New York City. Their wagons carried brooms, buckets and protective covers. It would be another 30 years before New York abolished its separate volunteer fire companies and created a paid city fire department – the beginning of what became the FDNY.

Fire salvage corps popped up across the country. In New York, the “patroleos,” as they were affectionately called, kept riding to fires in their own trucks, from their own firehouses, alongside FDNY firefighters for nearly two centuries. Many FDNY captains and lieutenants – and at least one legendary commissioner – got their start in the fire service at New York Fire Patrol.

To a bystander, the difference between the groups was nearly impossible to see. Both wore black turnout coats and pants marked with high-visibility stripes, steel-toed boots and breathing apparatuses. Both answered the same calls around the clock and ran toward burning buildings.

For most, they were distinguishable only by the color of their helmets, as FDNY donned black ones, and the New York Fire Patrol wore red.

“You go back and look at any New York fire footage, you’ll see the red helmets,” Roma told CNN.

But the line between salvage man and firefighter could become especially thin once a building was burning. Patrolmen entered the same smoke-filled rooms and faced many of the same dangers as the firefighters beside them, helping stretch hose and forcing open doors to perform lifesaving rescues.

And like many FDNY firefighters throughout the years, some patroleos never came home.

Thirty-one New York Fire Patrolmen died over the organization’s history, including Keith Roma.

A 25-year fight with no clear end

Arnold Roma first heard the number 343 in the days after 9/11, while he was digging through the ruins at Ground Zero searching for his son. A list of missing firefighters had circulated among FDNY officials on the night of September 11 before eventually making its way to the rank-and-file.

“People were coming up to me thinking Keith was off that day because he wasn’t on the list, so he must have been okay,” Roma said. Because of the closeness of the two groups, many in the fire service assumed any missing Fire Patrol members would have been included in FDNY’s list, he said.

Former FDNY Commissioner Sal Cassano, who was, at the time, the department’s assistant chief of operations, said on the night of the attacks he began calling firehouses in trying to determine who had been riding firetrucks that morning and who was still missing.

“Our first count was over 500,” Cassano said. As firefighters were located at nearby hospitals or otherwise accounted for, the number fell and the department settled on 343.

But no one called the Fire Patrol firehouses asking if they were missing anyone.

“To be honest, we weren’t thinking of it,” Cassano said. “We lost people, 98 pieces of apparatus — that’s engines, ladders, ambulances — so we had our hands full.”

Roma said he immediately began calling FDNY officials, including Cassano, asking why Keith wasn’t included. Cassano told him there was no way to add him to the department’s count.

“It’s a conversation that we had at headquarters, there was a lot of teeth gnashing saying, ‘We should count Fire Patrol,’” Cassano said. “But there were also retired members that were lost, and people wanted to include them in.”

“The powers that be at that time said, ‘No. The number is going to be the number of members of the New York City Fire Department that were active that day, working,’” Cassano said. “There was a lot of consternation in the room.”

Roma didn’t know it then, but the 343 number would become a haunt, mobilizing him into decades of fighting, and of being told no.

The FDNY declined CNN’s request for an interview or to elaborate on its statement that only active-duty members of the agency are included in the count.

25 years later, undeterred, Roma continues to appeal to the FDNY and others, so they may acknowledge Keith’s work as a firefighter on that day, resulting in the ultimate sacrifice.

“We work with them, we die with them, and they’ve acknowledged all of that, but the biggest thing, they won’t acknowledge him a fireman,” he said.

While not including Keith in their official tally, the department did later bestow upon him the FDNY Fireman’s Medal of Supreme Sacrifice. His bereaved father also points to other posthumous recognition, including a line-of-duty death medal from the International Association of Fire Fighters union – in which Keith was enrolled – and a 9/11 Heroes Medal of Valor and certificate from the White House declaring Keith’s death occurred “while serving a public safety agency as a firefighter,” signed by then-President George W. Bush.

“Keith was just a good guy at heart,” Sheehan, Keith’s lieutenant at Patrol 2, said. “He always gave more of himself – he was early for his shifts, even eating dinner with the guys when he was off that night and was just a pleasure at work.”

The 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack has brought a new wave of commemoration, with planners scaling up events to make the milestone more impactful. The Romas fear that, once again, they will have no way to honor their son on the same terms as families of the other 343.

“I want Arnold (Roma) to keep fighting because if it was me, I would have been fighting ‘til I had no more breath,” Cassano said.

Sheehan said he has never been comfortable with the number 343, which he believes makes the death toll too definitive and leaves out scores of other sacrifices.

“I would be the first one to go with 344,” Sheehan said. “But there’s so much focused on the number 343, but what about the hundreds of other guys that died of 9/11 cancer and illness, who were also in that building, including other Fire Patrol guys?”

Sheehan himself has battled several cancers as a result of 9/11 and must visit the World Trade Center Health Program multiple times a year.

Arnold Roma also goes in for regular checkups to monitor his decreased lung function, stomach problems, post-traumatic stress, anxiety and other health issues developed after the attacks: “I relive this thing 100 times a day,” he said.

So, if nowhere else, Keith is honored every day inside the Pennsylvania home where Roma now lives with his wife. Keith’s red helmet, still covered in soot, and a photograph of him grinning, sit proudly on display.

“Every day at 3:44 p.m., I come into the bedroom, and I salute him and the number 344,” he said. “I’ve done it for the last 25 years, and I won’t stop now.”

Fire Patrol “best-kept secret in New York”

Over its legacy spanning three centuries, the Patrol’s place in New York’s firefighting world became so intertwined with the FDNY that its history even became part of the department’s traditions.

Captain Albert S. Johnston, the son of one of the four original members of the Fire Patrol, received three FDNY lifesaving medals during his 40-year career with the corps in the early 1900s. The award could be given to members of either the FDNY or Fire Patrol. It was later renamed in Johnston’s honor, and the Albert S. Johnston Medal is still awarded to FDNY firefighters today.

In 1968, patrolman Ed Pospisil of Fire Patrol 3 led the effort to locate the bodies of 12 FDNY firefighters killed in a raging East 23rd Street fire the year before. Some were men he had spent his career working beside.

For his work, Pospisil received the highest award a patrolman could: the FDNY Albert S. Johnston Medal, named for a Fire Patrolman, but seldom given to one.

“Working patrol was the best job I ever had,” Pospisil, now an 85-year-old retired Hartford fire chief, said. “Any of them still alive would say the same thing.”

For the men who worked there, Fire Patrol was not simply an insurance company’s salvage operation. It was a firehouse with bells, trucks and traditions. It had old men who taught young ones how the job was done.

Craig Buccieri knew all about firehouses long before he ever put on patrol turnouts.

In 1973, after years hanging around his father’s firehouse as a boy, listening to the bells and watching the firefighters come and go, he took the test, did the training and joined Patrol 2.

“I grew up going to firehouses, I could count the bells in my sleep, and a lot of those guys on Patrol were like brothers to me,” Buccieri said. He would eventually leave Patrol for the FDNY, retiring as a lieutenant.

By then, Fire Patrol had become something much bigger than the men with canvas bags who had first appeared at New York fires more than a century earlier.

The decades passed in the archives, from pencil sketches of horse-drawn wagons to grainy black-and-white photographs, then to the saturated colors of 1970s film, with GMC Patrol firetrucks chugging through a changing New York. Through it all, the red-helmeted Fire Patrol kept appearing in the frame, evolving with the city it served.

Keith’s old Patrol 2 firehouse, now privately owned, still stands in Greenwich Village, bearing its red-brick facade and arched bay where horse-drawn wagons once waited beneath a stone carving of Mercury, the Roman god of speed.

At its peak, the organization employed nearly 400 patroleos across several firehouses and saved tens of millions of dollars in property over the years, including over a thousand irreplaceable objects from a 1958 fire at the Museum of Modern Art. When Philadelphia closed the doors of its last fire salvage company in 1962, New York Fire Patrol became the last of its kind in the country.

But the insurance industry’s reason for funding the Fire Patrol was becoming harder to justify as fire departments grew more sophisticated, buildings changed and the annual budget had climbed to roughly $8.5 million.

In 2006, the New York Board of Fire Underwriters, the insurance conglomerate signing its checks, decided it was no longer worth the cost. After nearly two centuries, the bells stopped and Patrol trucks pulled out of their firehouses for the last time.

Many of the men who had worn the uniform weren’t ready to let it disappear.

Arnold Roma became one of the most persistent voices behind an effort to resurrect Fire Patrol, arguing that New York had lost more than an antiquated insurance service. It had lost a specialized force whose job was to keep fires, and the damage they caused, from becoming worse.

The effort won support in City Hall and Washington. In 2011, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer announced more than $100,000 in federal funding for a proposed Staten Island Fire Patrol program, while state legislation advanced to bring the organization back.

But it never did. The bill stalled, and the money never revived the group.

The Fire Patrol is survived in photographs, old firehouse stories and the memories of the patroleos who answered its bells.

And, for Arnold Roma, in the fight to keep Keith’s heroism alive.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.