Fifteen years after 9/11, Reeves Park residents remember local firefighters who died in World Trade Center attacks

Fifteen years ago, two local firefighters answered one of the worst calls in our nation’s history: The World Trade Center had been struck by two jetliners, and thousands of civilians were trapped inside.

Like so many others that day, neither firefighter came home. They both perished trying to rescue those trapped in the towers, leaving behind grieving parents, siblings and children.

They have been remembered every year since then in an emotional ceremony on the anniversary of the attacks, held in the Riverhead neighborhood where they both were summer residents.

This Sunday, September 11, Reeves Park will hold its annual candlelight walk and memorial service at the 9-11 Memorial Park. Neighbors, friends and community members gather there each year for a solemn procession down Park Road, where they pass under a giant American flag hung from a Riverhead Fire Department ladder truck and into the park, where they pause for a ceremony of remembrance, prayer, reflection and unity.

The four-acre memorial park is the result of years of effort by Reeves Park residents, civic activists and concerned citizens, who fought the town and a developer’s plans for a retail center there.

The county eventually purchased the site and the park was built by the town, a shaded oasis on a busy country highway. A path — built with paving stones donated by a local volunteer firefighter — winds its way around display of steel from the fallen towers set at the base of the maple tree to a flagpole where the Stars and Stripes stand at half-mast for the annual ceremony. There are benches placed along the path.

Emotions are still raw for the family members of the two firefighters.

“It’s still right there in a lot of ways, the whole messy scene,” said Bob Kelly in an interview two years ago. Kelly’s younger brother and fellow NYC firefighter Thomas Kelly 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.

Now retired, Bob Kelly was still a NYFD member in 2001 and spent the days, weeks and months after the attacks digging through the rubble at Ground Zero.

The father of the other Reeves Park firefighter also spent many months afterward digging through the remains of the towers to try and find his son. Lee Ielpi helped found the “Band of Dads,” a group of firefighters’ fathers who 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, 2011.

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.

“Jon loved it out here,” Ann Ielpi said of the family’s summer home in a previous interview. 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 there.

This Sunday, walkers will assemble on the corner of Park Road and Marine Street in Reeves Park at 6:30 p.m. The walk to the memorial park at the corner of Sound Avenue and Park Road begins at 7 p.m.