Battalion Chief Charles Kasper, 54, of Special Operations Command, was home with his family that Tuesday morning when his beeper rang. He hopped on an engine near his Staten Island home to race to the scene. “Drive it like it’s stolen” was a favorite saying of his.
Kasper’s daughter and infant grandson lived 6 blocks from the WTC and she was out that beautiful morning pushing her stroller when she saw the plane strike. Kasper told his wife to tell her he’d be coming by to pick them up after he finished his work at the WTC.
A rescue expert and former Captain of Rescue 1, he had responded to the Father’s Day Fire where he and Ray Downey worked to rescue and find the trapped firefighters. He loved rescue and special operations. Posthumously promoted to Deputy Chief, on 9/11 he was directing fire operations in the North Tower.
I knew Charlie when we were both students at St. Thomas Aquinas School in Park Slope Brooklyn. It was so many years ago, and I have very cloudy memories of him then, yet his tragic loss affects me deeply, as do all the other innocents who needlessly died on 9-11. As the two heavenly friends tell Billy Bigelow in Oscar Hammerstein’s Carousel, “As long as there’s one person on earth who remembers you, it isn’t over.”