Parents of WTC cop to Mike: You're wrong, our son's a hero
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/11/04/2007-11-04_parents_of_wtc_cop_to_mike_youre_wrong_o.html
BY PATRICE O'SHAUGHNESSY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, November 4th 2007, 10:37 AM
Joseph Zadroga considered the two stunning twists in the saga of his dead son and weighed which was the more painful.
Was it the meeting at the city morgue, where Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch told the family in dry, scientific terms that James Zadroga, a decorated detective, died because he misused prescription drugs - not from inhaling toxic dust at Ground Zero?
Or was it Mayor Bloomberg publicly declaring that Hirsch's findings prove Zadroga, who became a worldwide symbol of the insidious health damage of 9/11, was not a hero?
"What Hirsch said really hurt. I knew it wasn't true," Joseph Zadroga said. "He disgraced my son's and my family's reputation, to say not just he was misusing drugs, but he was an intravenous drug user."
Then Zadroga shook his head and his eyes saddened.
"When Bloomberg said that, I said, 'I don't friggin' believe this.'"
All the Zadrogas have wanted for more than five years is for their son to be acknowledged as a 9/11 hero.
"It would be nice for his baby," said James' mother, Linda Zadroga, speaking of her orphaned granddaughter. "It would mean something for her."
The torment that has consumed the Zadroga family since their Jimmy took ill in 2002 did not end when he died last year. It was extended by the findings of two pathologists - that inhaled dust from Ground Zero killed him, and then by the shocking ruling by Hirsch.
Joseph Zadroga sat last week in the kitchen of the spacious gray shingled house in Little Egg Harbor on the Jersey Shore that the three generations of Zadrogas called home, his eyes scanning the panoramic view of Winding Creek and Great Bay, with Atlantic City rising in the distance.
He said he is absolutely positive there was no drug abuse.
"Jimmy had an intravenous line. I was giving him strong antibiotics through it," Zadroga said, pointing to crook of his elbow. "We doled out the other medication. He had short-term memory loss and would forget to take them, and we were afraid he would overdose.
"He had a pain-management doctor, he was getting eight tablets of OxyContin a day and 12 other medications."
A retired police chief of North Arlington, in Bergen County, Zadroga, 60, has a shaved head, gravelly voice and is powerfully built, as his son was.
He opened the 1,200-pound gray iron Liberty safe in a closet in his bedroom, where he keeps his guns and where he stored his son's medicines.
"He was on powerful stuff. We wanted to keep them from the baby," he explained.
Zadroga's eyes well up when he tells of caring for his son, who moved back with his parents in 2004 because he was sick and his wife had died suddenly. He had a toddler daughter to care for.
"He had two bags of antibiotics a day, it took 45 minutes for them to drip in," Zadroga said. "It became quality time for us. We sat and talked. Most of the rest of the time he'd be sleeping. I'm glad we had that time."
James Zadroga died at 34 on Jan. 5, 2006. His father found him on the floor. He had gotten up to get milk for his daughter - the cup was in his hand.
Dr. Gerard Breton, Ocean County medical examiner, did an autopsy and consulted with Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and Dr. Michael Baden, a renowned expert in forensic pathology.
The Armed Forces Institute said Zadroga's lungs had talc, cellulose, methacrylate and calcium phosphate, carbon and silica. Breton concluded Zadroga died of severe scarring of lung tissue and said the cause of death was directly related to 9/11.
It was the first link established between a Ground Zero worker's death and exposure to the dust there. James Zadroga became the face of post-9/11 illness, and Congress passed bills named for him to fund treatment for ailing Ground Zero workers.
Zadroga's family then asked Hirsch to review his death. They wanted his sacrifice documented by the city.
Hirsch studied slides of Zadroga's lung tissue. Hirsch also reviewed the military pathologist's report, but he didn't look at Zadroga's medical records, the detective's father said.
When the Zadrogas met two weeks ago with Hirsch, they brought along James Zadroga's young daughter Tyler-Ann. She sat in the room with her grandparents and watched as Joseph Zadroga propped a photo of her father, robust and slightly smiling in his blue NYPD uniform, on the table between them and Hirsch.
"Hirsch never looked at it," Joseph Zadroga recalled.
The longtime medical examiner told the family he had concluded James Zadroga had ground up his medication and injected the drugs into his bloodstream, leaving traces of the pills in his lung tissue.
The talc and cellulose found in the lung tissue are often binding agents in pills and capsules.
Linda Zadroga became so upset after Hirsch gave them the news that she bolted from the room. Her granddaughter followed.
"She saw how upset I was, and she was trying to comfort me," Linda Zadroga said.
In their grief, the family believes Hirsch's decision is part of a campaign to deny that their son's death is related to 9/11. They say the campaign included the feds or the city pressuring doctors and hospitals to deny their son care, and harassment from the NYPD, with police helicopters flying over their house.
"They don't want to open the floodgates" to all the others sickened at Ground Zero, Joseph Zadroga said.
Baden, the doctor who had consulted previously with the New Jersey medical examiner, disagrees with Hirsch's findings.
Baden said the materials in James Zadroga's lungs are found in concrete and wood. Baden noted he also saw large glass fibers, plastic and other materials that would have come from toxic dust. He said the material was primarily in the airways and concluded the particles were inhaled, not injected.
Joseph Zadroga has a 4-inch-thick blue binder of his son's medical records, letters to and from elected officials, doctors and lawyers. A biopsy photo of his son's lungs shows a black mass.
James Zadroga and his daughter lived on the second floor of the house, which has a remarkable fireplace fashioned like a sand castle, with two turreted towers forming the mantle.
Prominently displayed are a cross made from World Trade Center metal, a replica of Zadroga's gold detective shield, No. 6663, and photos of Tyler-Ann, who turned 6 Thursday. Zadroga's parents are raising the girl.
James Zadroga had surprised his father when he joined the NYPD. He was appointed in 1994, worked in Greenwich Village, Harlem, the Bronx, and in the street crime unit when it was an elite citywide unit. His last command was the Manhattan South homicide squad.
His police record aside from his 9/11 duty would be enough to deem him a hero cop: He amassed 187 arrests - 136 of them felonies - and earned 38 citations.
"He never told us about them," the father said.
Zadroga grew up in North Arlington, played football in high school, went to Bergen Community College and loved to hang out across the Hudson River. He later wrote about "the two towers that I grew up with when I looked out my back door."
He developed the "World Trade Center cough" soon after the attack on the skyscrapers. James Zadroga spent 400 hours at the rubble, according to the NYPD.
It's going on two years, but Linda Zadroga hasn't cleaned out her son's room.
"I can't go up there," she said. "I made it to the landing, and I came back down the stairs."
Like many parents of cops and firefighters killed on 9/11, the Zadrogas wear symbols of their pain and loss.
The mother wears a silver heart with a photo of her dead son and the words "Jimmy 9/11 Hero." Her husband has a large tattoo on his forearm of the Ground Zero cross and his son's shield.
"Everyone praises the dead as heroes as they should, but there are more living suffering than dead," James Zadroga himself wrote a year after 9/11, when illness gripped him.
Since declaring Zadroga was not a hero, Bloomberg has tempered his remarks, calling the detective a dedicated cop. But it did not assuage the outrage from the family and the city detectives union, so Bloomberg has invited the Zadrogas to City Hall tomorrow.
"I've been asking to meet with him since '02," said Joseph Zadroga. "I hope he publicly apologizes."
