Bloomberg Apologizes to the Family Of a Dead Ground Zero Detective
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Mayor Bloomberg apologized yesterday to the father of a police detective he had described last week as “not a hero” because of questions about his death following his work on the World Trade Center cleanup.
“I believe that James Zadroga was a hero for the way he lived, regardless of the way that he died,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters after meeting with the retired police officer’s father, Joseph Zadroga. Speaking at Harvard University last week, Bloomberg was asked about the intersection of science and public policy, and in answering he brought up Zadroga’s case. The chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, had recently ruled that the fatal lung disease that claimed Zadroga’s life in 2006 was not because of World Trade Center dust but because he had been injecting himself with ground-up pills.”Nobody wanted to hear that,” Mr. Bloomberg said a week ago. “We wanted to have a hero, and there are plenty of heroes. It’s just, in this case, science says this was not a hero.”
The comment upset Zadroga’s family and others within the police force. Mr. Zadroga said the mayor was “heartless” and asked to meet with him, while the police unions called for a public apology, and said Mr. Bloomberg had lost their trust.