Lt. Robert D. Cirri

A Second Turn at Love

Robert and Eileen Cirri met when she was an emergency room nurse and he was moonlighting as a paramedic. "There was this weird, electric charge," Mrs. Cirri said. She had not believed in love at first sight until then.

It was the second marriage for both. The Cirris had a merged family, with three of her children and three of his, ages 17, 16, 15, 14, 13 and 12.

Lieutenant Cirri, a member of the Port Authority Police Department, had about 10 ham radios operating at their home in Nutley, N.J., and helped shore up the state's emergency communications systems. One of the repeaters he set up for the Hudson County Office of Emergency Management was working on Sept. 11, with his voice, and his friends are keeping it. "His voice is still going on, as we speak," Mrs. Cirri said. "It's still keying up every 15 minutes on that repeater, out in space forever."

She found another remnant of him when she tried to log on to his e-mail and found he had chosen her first name as his password.

Lieutenant Cirri's body was found with the bodies of four other officers and that of a woman they had been trying to carry out in a rescue chair.

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on April 21, 2002.


Lt. Robert Cirri, 39, died helping others

The day of the World Trade Center attack, Eileen Cirri received a call from her husband, Lt. Robert Cirri, a Port Authority police officer.

He said he was a couple of blocks away, saw people running and was planning to help.

"He told me he was safe but that he couldn't watch people running out of the building," Eileen Cirri said. "He said he needed to go help."

Reports say Mr. Cirri gathered a group of fellow officers and led an expedition into the North Tower to try and help people. He lost his own life when the tower collapsed.

"I'm not surprised at all," said Lt. Paul Haggerty of the Lyndhurst Police, one of Robert Cirri's best friends. "That's just the type of guy he was."

From his work as a police officer to his part-time gig as a paramedic and even his hobby as a ham radio operator, friends and family say Mr. Cirri, a 39-year-old Nutley resident, lived to help others.

When he wasn't training other officers for the Port Authority, Mr. Cirri spent part of his weekends as a paramedic at Hackensack University Medical Center.

"He loved helping people and he was a good leader," Eileen Cirri said.

Haggerty said he and Mr. Cirri started their ham radio operation as a hobby, but that he soon realized he could help people at the same time.

Both men became a part of Jersey Coastal Emergency Services, a nonprofit organization that monitors emergency airwaves.

"He wanted to look out for the public," Haggerty said.

Mr. Cirri was also a good father to his two children and three stepchildren, bringing them all together on the weekends.

And his willingness to help others didn't stop with the public. Once, one of Mr. Cirri's children began choking on a hot dog. Eileen Cirri, at that time an emergency room nurse, lost her cool and panicked, but not Mr. Cirri.

"He was sitting at the table, popped a piece of steak into his mouth, calmly got up and performed the Heimlich Maneuver without missing a beat," Eileen Cirri said. "It doesn't surprise me at all what he did Tuesday."

Mr. Cirri is survived by his two children, Robert Jr. and Jessica, of West New York; three stepchildren, Bianca Jerez, Francesca Jerez and Kara Jerez of Nutley; and his parents, Maria and Dominick Cirri of Guttenberg. Services are pending.