Parents of fallen 9-11 firefighter: Justice is done.

“It looks like his smile is a little bit bigger today. Isn’t that right, Tommy?”

Sue Kelly addressed the portrait of her son hanging above the fireplace in her Reeves Park, Riverhead home Monday afternoon.

The oil-on-canvas painting depicts New York City firefighter Thomas R. Kelly dressed in full gear, a smile teasing the corners of his mouth. A younger Thomas, in high school graduation cap and gown, shares a portion of the canvas. The two Tommys keep watch over the small living room where the firefighter’s elderly and infirm parents spend most of their time now.

It’s been nearly 10 years since Tommy was killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He and the rest of his company, Ladder 105 in Brooklyn, had rushed into the burning skyscraper to rescue people trapped within. They are among the nearly 3,000 people who perished that day in a plot hatched on the other side of the world by Al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Tommy was just 38 years old.

His mother said she was watching the Mets game on TV Sunday night, when the game was interrupted by a news bulletin announcing bin Laden’s death. She hurried across the converted bungalow to tell her husband Emmet, who was getting ready for bed.

Mrs. Kelly said she didn’t think bin Laden would be captured in her lifetime.

“I didn’t even watch the end of the game,” she said.

Her husband was all smiles Monday afternoon. “I feel very elated, especially since it was the Navy seals that got him,” said Mr. Kelly, a Navy veteran who served in the Korean War. “That made me proud,” he said. “Justice has been done.”

Their eldest son, Robert — like his dad, a retired NYC firefighter — said he heard the news Sunday night when his 15-year-old son got a text message from a friend.

“I turned on the TV,” Bob Kelly said. “It was a surprise, a sense of almost shock. It’s hard to believe it actually happened after 10 years,” he said. “Osama bin Laden was really the face of what happened that day.”

“You feel like the good guys finally won,” Bob Kelly said.

But bin Laden’s death doesn’t really bring him a sense of closure, Kelly said. “You feel a sense of relief, a sense of pride in our country that these guys were able to find him after 10 years,” he said. But not closure. “This war will ever end. We’re fighting an ideology,” he said. “Not a nation.”

Like so many who perished in the collapse of the towers, Thomas Kelly’s remains have not been recovered. That too, makes any sense of closure elusive, his mother said.

Sue Kelly sits back in her favorite armchair, beneath her son’s portrait, opposite windows overlooking the beach where Tommy, his brothers and sister spent their childhood summers. His blue eyes seem to gaze out from the painting toward the sea in the distance, a view she enjoys in part because it makes her feel closer to her son.

“He loved it here,” she said. “It was home.”