Secret spree was a frilly bad bargain
AFTER THE 9/11 terror attacks, FDNY paramedic Michael Markowski spent a year at Ground Zero recovering body parts from the site and carefully cataloguing them at the city morgue.
The experience, he says, was so emotionally crippling that he fell into depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. He had suicidal thoughts. He could no longer work, lost his marriage, his medical certification, and spent time in psychiatric hospitals.
One of the people whose remains he indexed at the morgue was David Marc Sullins, a Cabrini Medical Center paramedic who died in the collapse of the south tower.
“I carried body parts out,” said Markowski, of Queens. “In the morgue, I catalogued body parts, the remnants, the bone fragments. It’s the totality of doing it for months on end. You can’t keep exposing yourself to human tragedy at that level every single day without having it affect you.”
Markowski, 45, of Rockaway Park, Queens, says he still suffers from intense nightmares after witnessing people jump from the burning towers that day. Just talking about his experiences gives him anxiety.
“It gives me chills to think about it,” he told the Daily News. “That’s completely seared in my mind like an endless loop.”
Of the six paramedics he worked with at Ground Zero, five are dead — four succumbed to cancer, Markowski said. One hanged himself.
He was hospitalized for depression, PTSD and suicidal thoughts three times at Long Island Jewish Medical Center twice in 2013 and once in 2014 — each time for about a month. And he was treated at the FDNY’s Counseling Services Unit from 2013 through 2014.
In November, because he had exhausted his sick leave but still couldn’t work, the FDNY had no choice but to fire him, he said.
Markowski applied for disability benefits with the city but was denied because officials refused to credit his 9/11 experiences as the cause of his depression, he said.
Because the regular pension for paramedics only kicks in after 25 years, he got nothing. He now lives on workers’ compensation and help from friends.
“The medical board is arbitrary and capricious and is destroying people’s lives,” says his lawyer Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goldberg said a doctor with the New York City Employee Retirement System actually approved the disability, then made an about-face and labeled him a “malingerer,” a person who feigns illness to avoid work. His request was then denied.
“They had an independent medical examiner who saw me and said I was 100% disabled,” Markowski said. “And then two months later he said I was a malingerer. How do you do that?”
After Markowski sued the retirement board, Brooklyn Judge Lisa Otley ruled that the board’s finding was “not based on facts.”
“The opinions and findings of the two independent doctors are WHAT AN indelicate crime!
Cops arrested a 33-year-old woman who busted her way into an Upper East Side Victoria’s Secret during a booze-fueled spree, officials said Wednesday.
Clad in tattered black clothing and a thick coat, Maximillia Cordero, of Brooklyn, damaged a revolving door to the E. 86th St. lingerie emporium at about 11:30 p.m. on Monday, cops said.
Her crude entry method didn’t go unnoticed.
A passing NYPD patrol found the unsecured door and spotted Cordero inside, stocking up on $1,000 worth of pushup bras, Gstrings, thongs and makeup, police said.
Cops took her into custody without incident, charging her with burglary, grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property, authorities said.
Cordero, who did seven months in prison for burglary in 2015, was intoxicated at the time of the break-in, officials said.