Mayor burns his hands over hero tag for 9/11 fireman

The mayor “said Hirsch may have made a mistake”, the family’s lawyer, Michael Barasch, told reporters after the half-hour private meeting in City Hall. Barasch said Bloomberg said he would ask a deputy mayor “to have Hirsch reconsider his findings.”

At a press conference later, however, a top aide to Bloomberg sought emphatically to dispel any expectation that Bloomberg would ask Hirsch to rethink his findings. “We have a medical examiner in the city,” said the aide, Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler. “It’s an independent agency that is supposed to make determinations without any outside pressure. And the mayor was very careful to tell the family that he wasn’t even going to discuss the case with Dr Hirsch because he felt it would be inappropriate.”

Barasch, the lawyer, said that he did not expect Bloomberg to pressure Hirsch, only to give him medical records that the family believes cast doubt on the medical examiner’s findings. Skyler said the mayor would forward the records.

The mayor touched off a controversy over the case on October 29, when he accepted an award at Harvard’s School of Public Health. Explaining why science can sometimes be unpopular, Bloomberg referred to the case of Zadroga and to Hirsch’s findings.

“We wanted to have a hero and there are plenty of heroes,” he said last week. “It’s just in this case science says this was not a hero.”

The family reacted to the statement with anger and pain, and Bloomberg was criticised by advocates for those who worked at ground zero. The detective’s father, Joseph Zadroga, said his son had not abused drugs, and the family demanded an apology from Bloomberg.

On Monday, Zadroga described the mayor as “gracious” in the meeting. “He said he was a true hero. He was a man about it,” Zadroga said, adding that the mayor had conceded that “he may have misstated it.”