HOPE FOR A DESPERATE HERO
Bank delays sale of ailing 9/11 cop’s home for now
When the twin towers came down, George Bender’s life was altered in an indelible way.
The retired police detective, who made 500 arrests during his decorated career, lost one of his best friends that day. He spent the days and weeks that followed working at the shattered site, combing the debris for victims’ remains and their personal effects. He assisted at the city morgue in the effort to identify those remains and notify families of the victims.
In the years after, Bender, now 49, developed 9/11-related anxiety disorder so acute that, at this point, he can barely leave his Queens home.
And now, as the 17th anniversary of that most tragic American event approaches again, Wells Fargo Bank is threatening to take that house away. Until this week, a foreclosure auction had been set for Friday on the steps of the Queens County Supreme Court.
The bank said Tuesday it was planning to delay the auction of the Astoria House, though the situation remains far from resolved for Bender, his wife Kristie and their two adult children.
“We’ve lost so much," says Kristie Bender, 47. “He’s not the same. It’s hard to watch my husband go through this, and it’s hard to be there for him. I not only have that, but I have to worry about losing the house.”
The situation highlights the grim fact that nearly two decades after the unforgettable devastation and carnage of 9/ 11, the event continues to impact the lives of many who were touched by it. Every week, it seems, a first responder dies from an illness caused by the toxic air at the site.
In Bender’s case, the damage was emotional, a product of the trauma that gripped him while he worked at Ground Zero and at other key locations in the aftermath.
“I was just a soldier,” the taciturn Bender tells the Daily News. “They just sent me there and I did what I had to do.”
Bender describes the landfill operation on Staten Island, where the debris was searched for human remains and personal effects, as an apocalyptic landscape surrounded by giant pieces of twisted metal. The ground bubbled from the methane gas emanating from the fill. He stood in a Tyvex suit meticulously searching for remains and the leavings of the dead – things like IDs, clothing, bracelets, wallets.
“You know the movie ‘Terminator’? That’s what it was like,” George Bender says. “Scrap metal everywhere. There were big lights. Twelve hour hours usually at night. I picked up heads, I picked up arms, bones. They used to make us throw them into a bucket like it was nothing. You walked it over to a (temporary morgue) building for them to try to do IDs. Everything was caked in ash and wet. It’s very hard to relive it again.”
The things he experienced sparked a condition that started cooking in the years after 9/11, then erupted into a severe manifestation of posttraumatic stress disorder in 2009 that nowadays keeps him more or less homebound. He resists leaving his house because just the thought of going outside often triggers serious panic attacks.
“I just can’t leave the house,” Bender says. “I just feel like I’m having a heart attack. I can’t breathe. It’s not something I can control. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
Dr. Michael Crane, medical director for Mt. Sinai’s World Trade Center Health Program, says that about 7,000 first responders have certified 9/11related PTSD, nearly 10% of the 72,000 cops, firefighters and EMTs who have sought treatment in the program. “PTSD can be crippling,” he says. “It can lead to symptoms like re-experiencing nightmares, avoidance, where you don’t want to see anyone, negative thoughts. It’s a miserable condition.” At the city morgue in lower Manhattan, Bender recalls lining up with other detectives to salute ambulances coming from the landfill containing remains, then escorting the remains, on gurneys, into the facility. It didn’t help that he was grieving the loss of a close friend, Edward (Teddy) White III, a brave firefighter who died at age 30, leaving behind a wife and 22-month-old daughter.
In the meantime, Bender was also handling his regular caseload of murders, assaults and robberies. Derek Wright, a retired detective who was Bender’s partner at the 63, said the duo were ranked fifth in the city in terms of case clearances from 2003 to 2005.
“His arrest record speaks for itself,” Wright tells The News. “He never shied away from anything. He was always willing to go, no matter how dangerous it was.”
When he and Kristie bought their home for $500,000 in 2007, he was earning about $90,000 including overtime and the initial monthly payment of $3,169 was manage-
able. They didn’t realize it at the time, but things were changing in ways that would radically alter their lives just a few years later.
Bender slowly worsened as the years progressed until, in 2009, he took most of the year off sick; the following year, he had to retire.
He recalls a day things got particularly bad, and suddenly he thought he was having a heart attack. It turned out to be severe panic attack.
“It got to a point where it made him lose normal life altogether in 2009,” Kristie Bender says. “Prior to that it was a little at a time. ”
Wright, who also worked at the Ground Zero, the landfill and the morgue, said he can totally see how Bender’s experiences after 9/11 could have caused his condition.
“People always say detectives see dead bodies all the time, but that’s b-------,” he says. “It always disrupts your thinking. At the ME’s office, it was body bags, and you had to suck it up. Legs, faces, bones, limbs, and you take that with you. It was brutal. Sure I can believe that he has anxiety.”
The struggle between the Benders and Wells Fargo over the foreclosure of the house has been brewing for a couple of years. Until 2015, the family lived on Bender’s regular police pension of $3,800 a month, which was not enough to pay the mortgage and their living expenses. As a result, the Benders now owe about $166,000 in missed payments that go back over a period of years. The debt accrued while the couple spent five years fighting to qualify for Social Security disability benefits of $2,500 a month, which they finally received in 2015.
The bank reduced the monthly payment amount to $1,898 in 2009, but the Benders’ finances continued to slide. The timing — just a year after the Wall Street foreclosure crisis — didn’t help matters.
“It got impossible to pay totally and completely when he stopped working,” Kristie Bender said. “We had to fight years for the Social Security. None of this was done on purpose. The income is now good to pay a mortgage, but not if they are going to make it so high that we are going to be in the same place in two months.”
Alice Nicholson, the Benders’ lawyer, said the Benders’ debt puts them on the lower end of loans that have qualified for modifications. “I’ve seen more than double that qualified,” she said. “This is an easy loan to modify. They now have enough income to qualify. The bank can extend the terms so the loan becomes affordable. It’s pointless what the bank is doing.
“The larger problem is that the bank is refusing to do modifications in New York City,” she added.
Wells Fargo spokesman Tom Goyda says the bank has been more than fair. “We have worked with the Benders for more than 10 years in an effort to find options that would allow them to stay in their home, and provided loan modifications on more than one occasion,” Goyda said. “Unfortunately, despite those efforts, they continued to fall behind in their payments and we moved to foreclose as a result.”
Only after several inquiries by the Daily News, Wells Fargo said Tuesday afternoon the bank “plans to request a postponement of the sale to give us additional time to evaluate option that may allow us to avoid foreclosure.”
Wright said, however, based on his ex-partner’s contributions to the city, the bank should give Bender and his family another chance.
“If they are saying they are going to foreclose, it’s wrong,” Wright said. “We’re supposed to be a society of helping each other. George wasn’t some regular guy trying to do wrong. He was trying to right. If anyone deserves a helping hand, it’s him.”