‘There was still smoke,’ Rosas remembers | News, Sports, Jobs

Dunkirk Mayor Wilfred Rosas was a New York state trooper on Sept. 11, 2001. He started that morning checking for seat belt use. Not long after terrorist attacks devastated the U.S. that day, he was checking for bombs in a shaken New York City.

Rosas, who was based out of the Fredonia barracks, remembered how the seat belt detail got recalled from Route 60 in the town of Dunkirk when the troopers received word of the attacks on the World Trade Center downstate.

“We had a whole group of troopers getting ready to do that when, all of a sudden, this happened. We got called, pulled off the detail and told to return to the station. Upon returning to the station, they had the TV on and we realized what was going on.

“We all witnessed when the second plane hit, we saw that live. The state police was put on alert that we were going to be sending guys to New York City. They were getting details together from all over the state.”

Rosas said the state police sent platoons to New York City on a rotating basis. They served there a week at a time, then came back home for a week, then went back downstate.

“I was not one of the first guys to go that day. My first deployment over there was probably two weeks after,” he said. “But when I arrived there, there was still smoke coming out of the rubble. There was chaos. I mean, it was bad. And there was still so many people still looking and trying to get confirmation on their loved ones.”

One of his first details was at a morgue.

“There were police officers we were working with we had never met. Our detail basically consisted of trying to keep people out — because it was mobbed with people. They were bringing in body parts that were being found at Ground Zero … and people wanted to identify them.

“At one point, they found a hand with a wedding band on the finger. And there were some people that wanted to come in and take a look at it, and our job was to hold them back. It was a really tough situation, people were crying. It was mentally tough on all the officers, it wasn’t just me. Everybody there had to be strong and do our job, which was to hold people back so we could have some type of organization.”

Rosas said his bomb detail was on a bridge entering New York City. “They thought they would have other people trying to do more damage,” he said. “Our job was, we were looking at monitors, stopping all the traffic that was coming through, checking underneath to make sure they didn’t have any bombs … especially the bigger tractor trailer type vehicles.”

The situation was “somewhat chaotic” in the beginning, but the details went on for months, well into 2002. “After a while, we started getting more under control and people knew what they were doing,” he said.

Rosas had to miss his son’s birth on Oct. 18, 2001, because he had to go down to New York City. “I tried to call the captain that was in charge of the detail, and he denied my request to stay for a week,” he said. “I was scheduled to be there and he expected me to report.”

The details were a life-changing experience for him, he said, because of the massive outpouring of help offered. “People were coming out to our details and bringing us food, water, whatever we needed, they would bring it. It wasn’t just the agencies working together, it was a community effort.”

Rosas went on, “I remember that there were some of the younger members of the team that were there, were questioning, ‘Why exactly are we here?’ We were being told, ‘Listen, right now, people are not safe. People are afraid to come out.’ We wanted things to go back to normal as soon as possible. So some of us were sent there not to patrol, but to add more police presence, especially in the Manhattan area, to make people feel safe.”