Sept. 11 memories still vivid and painful despite passage of time

Thirteen years after the terror attacks on America that claimed nearly 3,000 lives, emotions are still raw for victims’ family members.

“It’s hard to believe it’s 13 years ago that I last sat on the beach with my brother Tommy and last saw so many friends who perished,” said Bob Kelly, whose younger brother and fellow NYC firefighter was killed on Sept. 11. A member of Brooklyn’s Ladder 105, Tommy and the other members of his engine company were last seen rushing into the south tower to rescue people trapped inside.

“It’s still right there in a lot of ways, the whole messy scene,” Kelly said. Now retired, he was a NYFD member in 2001 and spent the days, weeks and months after the attacks digging through the rubble at Ground Zero.

Kelly arrived in Riverhead yesterday evening, after a day spent at services in the city, just as he’s done each Sept. 11 since 2002. The routine was different this year — the first Sept. 11 without his parents, Emmet and Sue, who both passed away last fall.

“It was a very weird day,” Kelly said after memorial service at the small park on Sound Avenue. His parents, Reeves Park residents for nearly 50 years, lived just long enough to see the memorial park built in 2013. They attended the first service held there a year ago. Emmet Kelly, a retired firefighter, passed away Oct. 15 and his wife followed him on Nov. 18.

“I always come out here to pick up my parents and take them to the firehouse in Brooklyn first, then to the city,” Bob Kelly said of his Sept. 11 routine for more than a decade. “Today I kept thinking there was something else I had to do.”

Last year, he and his brother Jim, pushing their parents’ wheelchairs, led Reeves Park residents down Thomas Kelly Memorial Road in a candlelight procession to the corner memorial. It was the first service in the just-completed memorial park, situated on a four-acre site saved from commercial development by community protest. And it would be his parents’ last.

This year, Bob and Jim and their sister Jean Marie, surrounded by their family, friends and neighbors, joined Riverhead volunteer firefighters and town councilmen John Dunleavy and James Wooten for a service in the park conducted by the Rev. Pitor Markiewicz of St. Isidore’s Church.

Longtime Reeves Park summer resident Ann Ielpi, who lost her 29-year-old firefighter son Jonathan in the terror attack, attended the service for the first time this year. She and her husband Lee, a retired firefighter, made Riverhead their year-round home in April.

Jonathan Ielpi, of Squad 288 in Queens, had been a member of NYFD for five years on Sept. 11, 2001. He left behind a wife and two young sons.

Lee Ielpi and other firefighter fathers formed the “Band of Dads” that sifted through the rubble of Ground Zero for months after the towers collapsed. Ielpi was the only father to recover his son’s body in full, on Dec. 11, 2001.

“Jon loved it out here,” Ann Ielpi said of the family’s summer home. They lived in Great Neck, where in 2002 a park was named in his memory. A life-size bronze statue of her son stands in a small plaza. She attended a service at Jonathan L. Ielpi Firefighters Park earlier in the day yesterday, before returning home to Riverhead.

“I’m very overwhelmed by the spirit of the community here, the turnout for this all these years later,” Ielpi said, taking in the scene around her.

A giant American flag waved from a Riverhead Fire Department ladder truck. Riverhead firefighters, caps over their hearts, stood in a semicircle around the flagpole, where Old Glory hung at half-mast. Dozens of people joined in prayer, and listened to the reflection offered by Sound Park Heights Association vice president Amanda Fermature. Brian Noone, 11, played taps on his trumpet. Patrick O’Neill’s bagpipes filled the air with the mournful tones of “Danny Boy” as dusk gathered in the evening sky.

The new park is a place that lends itself to reflection despite the hum of traffic on Sound Avenue.

“I always try to make some time to talk to Tommy,” Kelly said. “He’s a part of what I am now, in so many ways, and I can hear him more often than not, when I listen to the silence.”

Lisa Finn contributed reporting.

RiverheadLOCAL photos by Peter Blasl and Denise Civiletti

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