“Things changed very quickly and I knew he was going there. “Chris worked for a rescue fire company and they automatically go to anything big, no matter where they’re stationed, so I assumed he was headed there,” she said.Īfter United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the south tower shortly after 9 a.m., Jane Blackwell said there was no doubt in her mind that her husband was either there or on his way. We reviewed hundreds of pages of police reports, criminal case filings and court data related to intimate partner violence in Connecticut. That was how she first learned something was going on in New York City, and she went into the backroom to watch the TV. When American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center’s north tower at 8:46 a.m., Jane Blackwell said her colleagues started coming up to her and asking if her husband was working that morning. I worked for Danbury Ambulance, and some of the crew people … had the TV on in the backroom when it all started to go down,” she said. Jane Blackwell said she will never forget the morning of Sept. “One of his really big medals he got for saving a lady after a plane went off the runway at LaGuardia (Airport).” “He had a uniform full of medals,” his wife said. He also received the Heroism and Community Service Medal in 1989, according to his obituary. Involved in countless rescues throughout his career, Blackwell earned some of New York’s highest awards, including the Thomas Kenney Award for Courage in 1990 and the New York Medal of Valor in 1992. She said he chose Putnam Lake because of its close proximity to New Fairfield and he didn’t want to cut ties with the town where they grew up and met.

“He had been in Putnam Lake since coming home from the Air Force because he was trying to get on the job, and I moved over in 1985 - the year we got married,” Jane Blackwell said. New York City firefighters not only had to be at least 21 years old, she said, but had to live in one of the five boroughs or certain counties within the state.

He was discharged at the right time to become a firefighter in New York. When he was 16 years old, Blackwell became a volunteer with New Fairfield Volunteer Fire Company A.Īfter graduating from Danbury’s Immaculate High School in 1977, his wife said he joined the U.S. “I never thought that he would go to work and not come home,” said Jane Blackwell, who still lives in the Putnam Lake, N.Y., area, where she and her husband relocated to from New Fairfield in the mid-1980s.Ĭhristopher Blackwell had been a New York City firefighter for more than 20 years, as well as a part-time paramedic with Danbury Ambulance - but his first responder experience dated back even further. Blackwell - who had celebrated his 20th anniversary with the city’s fire department just five weeks prior - was among the more than 340 firefighters who died in Lower Manhattan that day.

Gta 9/11 2016