The 9/11 Firefighter Who Wasn’t Counted—and the Father Still Fighting for 344

Arnold Roma was asleep when the wall-mounted telephone rang, the kind of deep sleep that only a 12-hour hospital shift can produce. He had been home five hours.

He pulled the corded receiver to his ear. Before he could say hello, sirens screamed through the line.

“A plane just hit the World Trade Center!” his son Keith shouted from a firetruck, the engine roaring behind him.

Roma, then 49—a nurse, volunteer firefighter and retired NYPD officer—felt his body stiffen. He had spent years riding calls with Keith at their New Jersey fire company. Now, suddenly, he was awake.

“Dad, they’re going to need everybody,” Keith, 27, said. “You better get down here.”

“Thanks, I’ll meet you there,” Roma replied.

He hung up, not knowing it was the last time he would hear his son’s voice.

Keith Roma was not an FDNY firefighter. He was a New York Fire Patrolman assigned to Patrol 2, a private fire salvage corps that had worked beside the FDNY for nearly two centuries. To the public, the two forces often looked identical: same turnout gear, same breathing apparatus, same calls. The clearest difference was the color of their helmets. FDNY firefighters wore black. Fire Patrolmen wore red.

On September 11, 2001, that color distinction would shape how one family’s loss was remembered. It would also help explain why Keith’s name is missing from the number 343—the FDNY’s toll of active members killed at the World Trade Center—even though he died doing the same work, in the same towers, beside the same firefighters.

A father’s search

When Arnold Roma reached the World Trade Center, both towers were still standing, each pierced by a hijacked Boeing 767. Smoke poured from the wounds. Jet fuel bled down the facades.

Keith was somewhere inside the North Tower, his father believed. He had been working that morning at Patrol 2, a firehouse only blocks from the trade center.

A fire chief told Roma to set up a triage area in the South Tower. As he scanned the sea of black helmets, he looked for the scattered red flash that would mean his son. He did not see it.

I’ll get back to Keith, he told himself.

He ran toward the lobby, dodging falling glass and the bodies of trapped workers who jumped from 90 stories up. He was only feet away when the South Tower began to collapse around him.

Concrete engulfed him. Debris blinded him. He believed he was alive only because he could hear choking screams around him. He dug himself out, joined a battered group trying to escape, gave his protective coat to a civilian whose skin was exposed and took turns carrying an FDNY firefighter whose broken femur jutted through his overalls.

As he was lifted into an ambulance, Roma thought of Keith’s fire company. They had to have seen what just happened, he thought. I hope they got the heck away from here.

Keith had not.

The last minutes inside the North Tower

Fire Patrol 2 Lt. John Sheehan, Keith Roma and driver Joe Krasko had driven their rig from West 3rd Street to the World Trade Center. When Sheehan saw smoke billowing from the North Tower, he radioed other patrol units to respond.

More than a dozen patrolmen came from across the city. They helped extinguish fires, rescue trapped civilians and evacuate the towers. Inside the North Tower lobby, Keith and Sheehan joined firefighters prying open elevator doors and guiding workers down the stairs.

“I witnessed Keith carry at least a half a dozen people to safety,” Sheehan, now 70 and retired, told CNN. “Bringing them down steps, handing them off to cops or EMTs.”

Then, standing about 10 feet from Keith, Sheehan heard what sounded like a freight train. Everything went black. The South Tower had fallen, creating a blinding wind tunnel in the North Tower lobby.

He yelled for Keith. No answer. He screamed again. Nothing.

When the air cleared enough to see, Keith was gone. A wall of debris stood between Sheehan and the spot where his colleague had been. Sheehan escaped, bleeding from the head, and told fellow patrolmen that Keith was still inside.

As they turned to run toward the North Tower, it came down. Of the 16 Fire Patrolmen who responded that day, Keith was the only fatality.

104 days

Arnold Roma spent three days in the hospital after 9/11. He had severe breathing problems, temporary blindness from debris and a broken arm. Each night, he wished tomorrow would bring word of his son.

When he was released, he did not go home to change. He went straight back to Ground Zero. There, he took on a nightmarish new job: digging for Keith’s body.

He retired early from his nursing job and spent 12 hours a day, seven days a week, moving concrete on the north end of the pile, despite his own injuries. At least one member of the Fire Patrol family could usually be seen at Ground Zero, Sheehan said, looking for their missing brother.

It would be 104 days before Arnold Roma saw his son again.

On Christmas Eve 2001, rescuers found Keith stories below where the North Tower once stood. He was among a group of civilians who, rescuers believed, he had been escorting to safety when the towers collapsed.

After 9/11, it became tradition that when a fallen firefighter was identified in the rubble, his unit would carry him out. Sheehan and other men from Patrol 2 got the call. They descended the long ramp, several stories into the debris pile, and helped bring Keith back to the top.

“It was Christmas, and it was probably one of the worst things I had ever experienced in my life,” Sheehan said.

In the fire service, Christmas shifts were always busy. “But this—this was something else,” he said. “It was just horrible. But he deserved the honor.”

At the top of the pile, Arnold Roma helped carry his son’s body—still clad in his Fire Patrol coat and suspendered trousers—across Ground Zero and into an ambulance. Keith did not look the same after more than three months in the wreckage, but Roma did not need a wallet or ID to know it was his son. He just knew.

That day, Roma took one last lights-and-sirens ride with Keith, clutching the red helmet now soiled by debris. As the vehicle moved through New York streets lined with firehouses, intercoms blared four sets of five bell strikes—the signal honoring a firefighter killed in the line of duty. Roma personally unloaded his son at the 30th Street morgue.

The number that left him out

For Arnold Roma, the agony did not end that day. It changed into a longer search—for answers, recognition and a place for Keith in the story of 9/11.

343. The number became part of the national vocabulary, printed on memorials, spoken at ceremonies and repeated every September as the count of FDNY firefighters killed at the World Trade Center.

Keith was not one of them. He was a New York Fire Patrolman and a New Jersey volunteer firefighter. When the FDNY counted its dead—a tally that also included an EMT, a paramedic and a chaplain—Keith was left out.

For a quarter century, that distinction has followed his father. Roma has called, written, argued and begged for Keith to be recognized alongside the FDNY firefighters whose fate he shared.

“Every waking day of my life the number upsets me,” Roma told CNN.

Despite responding to the call, helping stretch hose and carrying victims to safety, Keith’s status as a patrolman means his name is absent from the memorial along Ten House on Liberty Street, the closest firehouse to the Twin Towers. It is also missing from the black marble monument inside the city’s fire museum that photographed the 343 heroes, and his name is rarely uttered during 9/11 tribute services across the country.

The FDNY says the number has a specific meaning. “September 11 brought so many heroes to the forefront, and we continue to mourn them all,” Amanda Farinacci, FDNY deputy commissioner of public information, said in an emailed statement to CNN. “The number 343 maintained by the FDNY for decades comes from the number of active members of the FDNY who were killed in the World Trade Center attacks.”

Roma believes the number should be 344. More than anything, he wants his son’s heroism remembered.

“If it wasn’t for my family’s fight and the guys on the Fire Patrol, Keith’s memory would have been just tossed away,” Roma said. “If they just included him, the world would know that he died a hero.”

A separate force with a shared danger

The New York Fire Patrol predated the FDNY. Its roots reach back to the 1700s, when men with canvas bags, blankets and an odd assortment of tools began showing up at fires to save property from smoke, water and rescue chaos.

By 1835, the Association of Fire Insurance Companies had hired four men to attend every fire across the city and protect insured property. Paid $250 a year, they became the first paid fire service members in New York City. Their wagons carried brooms, buckets and protective covers. It would be another 30 years before New York abolished its separate volunteer fire companies and created a paid city fire department—the beginning of what became the FDNY.

Fire salvage corps appeared across the country, but New York’s “patroleos,” as they were affectionately called, kept riding to fires in their own trucks from their own firehouses alongside FDNY firefighters for nearly two centuries. Many FDNY captains and lieutenants—and at least one legendary commissioner—started in the Fire Patrol.

To bystanders, the difference was nearly impossible to see. Both wore black turnout coats and pants with high-visibility stripes, steel-toed boots and breathing apparatuses. Both answered the same calls around the clock and ran toward burning buildings. For most, only the helmets set them apart: black for FDNY, red for the Fire Patrol.

But once a building was burning, the line between salvage man and firefighter could become thin. Patrolmen entered the same smoke-filled rooms, faced many of the same dangers and helped stretch hose and force open doors during rescues. Like many FDNY firefighters over the years, some patroleos never came home. Thirty-one New York Fire Patrolmen died over the organization’s history, including Keith Roma.

How 343 became official

Arnold Roma first heard the number 343 in the days after 9/11, while he was digging through the ruins at Ground Zero. A list of missing firefighters had circulated among FDNY officials on the night of the attacks before making its way to the rank and file.

“People were coming up to me thinking Keith was off that day because he wasn’t on the list, so he must have been okay,” Roma said. Because of the closeness of the two groups, many in the fire service assumed any missing Fire Patrol members would have been included in the FDNY’s list, he said.

Former FDNY Commissioner Sal Cassano, then the department’s assistant chief of operations, said he began calling firehouses that night to determine who had been riding firetrucks that morning and who was still missing.

“Our first count was over 500,” Cassano said. As firefighters were located at nearby hospitals or otherwise accounted for, the number fell, and the department settled on 343.

But no one called the Fire Patrol firehouses to ask if they were missing anyone.

“To be honest, we weren’t thinking of it,” Cassano said. “We lost people, 98 pieces of apparatus—that’s engines, ladders, ambulances—so we had our hands full.”

Roma said he immediately began calling FDNY officials, including Cassano, asking why Keith was not included. Cassano told him there was no way to add him to the department’s count.

“It’s a conversation that we had at headquarters, there was a lot of teeth gnashing saying, ‘We should count Fire Patrol,’” Cassano said. “But there were also retired members that were lost, and people wanted to include them in.”

“The powers that be at that time said, ‘No. The number is going to be the number of members of the New York City Fire Department that were active that day, working,’” Cassano said. “There was a lot of consternation in the room.”

The FDNY declined CNN’s request for an interview or to elaborate on its statement that only active-duty members of the agency are included in the count.

Twenty-five years later, Roma continues to appeal to the FDNY and others to acknowledge Keith’s work as a firefighter that day—work that ended in the ultimate sacrifice.

“We work with them, we die with them, and they’ve acknowledged all of that, but the biggest thing, they won’t acknowledge him a fireman,” he said.

Honors, but not the number

While Keith was not included in the FDNY’s official tally, the department later awarded him the FDNY Fireman’s Medal of Supreme Sacrifice. His father also points to other posthumous recognition: a line-of-duty death medal from the International Association of Fire Fighters, in which Keith was enrolled, and a 9/11 Heroes Medal of Valor and certificate from the White House declaring that Keith died “while serving a public safety agency as a firefighter,” signed by then-President George W. Bush.

“Keith was just a good guy at heart,” Sheehan said. “He always gave more of himself—he was early for his shifts, even eating dinner with the guys when he was off that night and was just a pleasure at work.”

The 25th anniversary of the attacks has brought a new wave of commemoration, with planners scaling up events to make the milestone more impactful. The Roma family fears that, once again, they will have no way to honor Keith on the same terms as families of the other 343.

“I want Arnold to keep fighting because if it was me, I would have been fighting ’til I had no more breath,” Cassano said.

Sheehan said he has never been comfortable with the number 343. He believes it makes the death toll too definitive and leaves out scores of other sacrifices.

“I would be the first one to go with 344,” Sheehan said. “But there’s so much focused on the number 343, but what about the hundreds of other guys that died of 9/11 cancer and illness, who were also in that building, including other Fire Patrol guys?”

Sheehan himself has battled several cancers as a result of 9/11 and must visit the World Trade Center Health Program multiple times a year. Arnold Roma also goes in for regular checkups to monitor decreased lung function, stomach problems, post-traumatic stress, anxiety and other health issues developed after the attacks.

“I relive this thing 100 times a day,” he said.

A ritual of remembrance

At home in Pennsylvania, where Roma now lives with his wife, Keith is honored every day. His red helmet, still covered in soot, and a photograph of him grinning sit proudly on display.

“Every day at 3:44 p.m., I come into the bedroom, and I salute him and the number 344,” Roma said. “I’ve done it for the last 25 years, and I won’t stop now.”

Over three centuries, the Fire Patrol’s place in New York’s firefighting world became so intertwined with the FDNY that its history became part of the department’s traditions. Capt. Albert S. Johnston, son of one of the four original Fire Patrol members, received three FDNY lifesaving medals during his 40-year career in the early 1900s. The award could be given to members of either the FDNY or the Fire Patrol. It was later renamed in Johnston’s honor, and the Albert S. Johnston Medal is still awarded to FDNY firefighters today.

Patrolman Ed Pospisil of Fire Patrol 1 led the effort to locate the bodies of 12 FDNY firefighters killed in a raging East 23rd Street fire in 1966. Some were men he had spent his career working beside. For his work, Pospisil received the highest award a patrolman could: the FDNY Albert S. Johnston Medal, named for a Fire Patrolman but seldom given to one.

“Working patrol was the best job I ever had,” Pospisil, now an 85-year-old retired fire chief, told CNN. “Any of them still alive would say the same thing.”

For the men who worked there, the Fire Patrol was not simply an insurance company’s salvage operation. It was a firehouse with bells, trucks and traditions. It had old men who taught young ones how the job was done.

Craig Buccieri knew firehouses long before he put on patrol turnouts. In 1973, after years hanging around his father’s firehouse as a boy, listening to the bells and watching firefighters come and go, he took the test, trained and joined Patrol 2.

“I grew up going to firehouses, I could count the bells in my sleep, and a lot of those guys on Patrol were like brothers to me,” Buccieri said. He eventually left the Patrol for the FDNY, retiring as a lieutenant.

The end of the Patrol

By then, the Fire Patrol had become something much bigger than the men with canvas bags who first appeared at New York fires more than a century earlier. The decades passed in archives—from pencil sketches of horse-drawn wagons to grainy black-and-white photographs, then to the saturated colors of 1970s film, with GMC Patrol firetrucks chugging through a changing New York.

Through it all, the red-helmeted Fire Patrol kept appearing in the frame, evolving with the city it served. Keith’s old Patrol 2 firehouse, now privately owned, still stands in Greenwich Village, its red-brick facade and arched bay recalling the horse-drawn wagons that once waited beneath a stone carving of Mercury, the Roman god of speed.

At its peak, the organization employed nearly 400 patroleos across several firehouses and saved tens of millions of dollars in property over the years, including more than a thousand irreplaceable objects from a 1958 fire at the Museum of Modern Art. When Philadelphia closed its last fire salvage company in 1962, the New York Fire Patrol became the last of its kind in the country.

But the insurance industry’s reason for funding the Patrol became harder to justify as fire departments grew more sophisticated, buildings changed and the annual budget climbed to roughly $8.5 million.

In 2006, the New York Board of Fire Underwriters, the insurance conglomerate that signed its checks, decided the cost was no longer worth it. After nearly two centuries, the bells stopped, and Patrol trucks pulled out of their firehouses for the last time.

Many of the men who had worn the uniform were not ready to let it disappear. Arnold Roma became one of the most persistent voices behind an effort to resurrect the Fire Patrol, arguing that New York had lost more than an antiquated insurance service. It had lost a specialized force whose job was to keep fires, and the damage they caused, from becoming worse.

The effort won support in City Hall and Washington. In 2011, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer announced more than $100,000 in federal funding for a proposed Staten Island Fire Patrol program, while state legislation advanced to bring the organization back. But it never did. The bill stalled, and the money never revived the group.

The Fire Patrol survives in photographs, old firehouse stories and the memories of the patroleos who answered its bells. And for Arnold Roma, it survives in the fight to keep Keith’s heroism alive.