9/11 toll grows
Cancer claims the 24th NYPD hero of 2018
CANCER TIED to the 9/11 terror attacks has taken another retired member of the NYPD.
Former Chief of Detectives William Allee, who worked at Ground Zero and the Staten Island landfill after 9/11, died Thursday morning after a battle with leukemia.
Allee is the 24th former member of the Police Department to die this year from cancer linked to the toxins from the worst terror attack in American history. Twenty-four former cops died last year.
Allee, 76, died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where the NYPD was planning a ceremonial tribute Thursday afternoon.
He joined the department in 1963 and retired in 2003, six years after he was named chief of detectives.
Last Friday, retired Detective Harry Valentin, 57, died of brain cancerat his homein NewJersey.
A close friend and former partner, Chief Patrick Conry, gave the eulogy at his funeral Tuesday in Hammonton, N.J., and called Valentin, who worked two years with the Department of Correction on before joining the NYPD, a great pubublic serrvant.
“Harry had a great life, and even though we’re sad that he’s gone, we e want to celebrate e the life he had,” said Conry, an NYPD spokesman. “He had a great career . . . and he knew success and the satisfaction of knowing he did something that mattered. “He made the city a better place.” Valentin, who joined the NYPD in 1984 and was assigned to the Counterterrorism Bureau when he retired in 2012, is survived by four sons and his wife, Georgina, G also a retired ret NYPD detec detective. F Fatalities relat lated to the S Sept. 11, 2 2001, terror a attacks h have spiked t this year. Among th the two doze en cops, man many of them retired retired, who have died, was wa 75th Precinct Lt. Wil William Wanser, 60, who passed away after a yearlong fight with pancreatic cancer on March 25. Detective Pedro Esponda, 60, who joined the NYPD in 1982 and retired from the 71st Pre- cinct, died on the same day.
Initially, the federal government was slow to recognize the link between health problems and the terror attacks.
The initial law providing compensation for 9/11-related illness, named after NYPD Detective James Zadroga, failed to gain adoption in its first pass in Congress.
It finally won approval in 2010 and then-President Barack Obama signed it into law. It was reauthorized in 2015.
Under the 2019 budget, President Trump removed the World Trade Center Health Program — which is funded by the Zadroga Act — from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health..
Federal legislators on both sides of the aisle opposed the move, claiming that the 83,000 survivors of 9/11 who rely on the trade center program would get lost in the bureaucratic shuffle — and lose out on services and medicine they need.