Honor 9/11 heroes at St. Michael’s

East Elmhurst’s St. Michael’s Cemetery is known for honoring the heroes of 9/11 with computerized monuments, but it now has a digital First Responders Monument for police officers and firefighters from all over the city who lost their lives in the line of duty before and after 9/11.
The dedication of the new monument took place during the cemetery’s annual 9/11 memorial service on Saturday, September 6, which was attended by local politicians and families of the 9/11 heroes.
Like the other three monuments at the cemetery dedicated to first responders, the new monument features memory medallions - silver buttons against every name. When you push the button, stories about the hero submitted by their loved ones pop up on a computer the size of an iPod, which the cemetery provides to visitors for reading the stories.
“The memory medallions add a tremendous depth,” said Maureen Santora, who lost her 23-year-old son, a Manhattan firefighter, during the World Trade Center attacks. Her son’s name is inscribed on the Queens firefighters monument.
Santora and her husband Alexander have contributed financially and in other ways to the creation of the new First Responders Monument at St. Michael’s, where their son is buried.
“Those were individuals who were loved, who had families, who were special in every way,” said Santora about the newly listed first responders. “We can never ever forget them, ever,” she said, explaining that anybody who died as a hero, even if it wasn’t on 9/11, deserves to be remembered.
Santora, of Astoria, then read to the audience a poem she wrote in memory of her son Christopher, whose photo she wears around her neck on a heart-shaped medallion. “It’s been seven years since we have been apart, there hasn’t been a single day that you’re not in my heart,” she read.
“We can’t say enough about them that can really express the gratitude we have for them,” said Congressmember Joseph Crowley about the heroes lost during 9/11.
“The ceremony was so heartfelt, so beautiful,” said Theresa Mullan, of Bayside, who throughout the service held a color photo of her son Michael, a firefighter in Manhattan who died at the age of 34. “That’s a brave man that died on 9/11,” Mullan said about her son.
“He wasn’t married, but he had a hundred girlfriends,” Mullan recalled. “When he sat down at the piano, he became a Jerry Lee Lewis. He told silly jokes and stories.”
St. Michael’s, located on 72-02 Astoria Boulevard, plans to continue honoring people like Michael Mullan. The cemetery intends to expand its list of memory medallions to include all the 343 firefighters in the city who died on 9/11 - not just the 75 individuals from Queens as is the case now, said Edward Horn, cemetery director.
St. Michael’s also plans to add to its digitized monument list of first responders who died on other occasions, Horn added. Currently, this list goes back to 1995 for officers of the New York City Police Department and the Fire Department of New York; for officers from the Port Authority Police Department, the list goes back to 1975, Horn explained.