Let’s Skip The Details

New York Times, way to go for raining on everyone’s parade by revealing that the story about police officer Cesar Borja is probably not as perfect as op-eds and grieving politicians make it out to be*:

For days, a New York City police officer, Cesar A. Borja, who died of lung disease last month, was held up as a symbol of the medical crisis affecting the thousands of emergency personnel and construction workers who labored on the smoking remains of the fallen World Trade Center after the 9/11 attack.

The Daily News published an article describing how Officer Borja had rushed to the trade center site after the twin towers fell, breathing in clouds of toxic dust that seared his lungs, and how he had chosen not to wear protective gear because the federal government had declared the air safe.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote to President Bush seeking more federal money to care for the workers and citing Officer Borja’s months of “16-hour shifts” at the disaster site. The priest at his funeral in Queens pointed out that Officer Borja had worked as a volunteer in the recovery and cleanup efforts.

It was a powerful story, one that brought the officer’s eloquent son to the State of the Union address in Washington on Jan. 23, the day of his father’s death. The son later met with President Bush, and afterward Mr. Bush, in discussing more aid for rescue workers, said he was eager to see money directed to “first responders,” those first on the scene in the days and weeks after the attacks. “If they were on that pile and if they were first responders, they need to get help,” he said.

It turns out, though, that very few of the most dramatic aspects of Officer Borja’s powerful story appear to be fully accurate. Government records and detailed interviews with Officer Borja’s family indicate that he did not rush to the disaster site, and that he did not work a formal shift there until late December 2001, after substantial parts of the site had been cleared and the fire in the remaining pile had been declared out.

Officer Borja worked traffic and security posts on the streets around the site, according to his own memo book, and there is no record of his working 16 hours in a shift. He worked a total of 17 days, according to his records, and did not work as a volunteer there. He signed up for the traffic duty, his wife said, at least in part as a way to increase his overtime earnings as he prepared to retire.

“It’s not true,” Eva R. Borja, the officer’s wife, said of the Daily News account of his rushing there shortly after the collapse of the trade center. In two extensive interviews, Mrs. Borja displayed her husband’s memo book, where he kept detailed notes about his work across his career. The first entry for working at ground zero is Dec. 24, 2001. Almost all the rest come in February, March and April 2002, five or more months after the attacks.

. . .

Mrs. Borja, asked to explain how all the differing reports appeared in the press, suggested that things had simply spiraled out of control. “When I would read it, I would say, ‘Why did they put that there?'” she said. She said she was too distracted caring for her husband and handling his funeral to correct the record.

. . .

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, would not talk about the details of the Borja case. He said the president respected the officer and his son and all who worked at ground zero.

“Ceasar Borja is someone who loved and cared for his father, and his father was a hero from what we know of New York law enforcement and his work at the World Trade Center,” Mr. Fratto said. “It is almost beside the point what the specific details were.”

*Then again, if Borja’s apparent low level of exposure at Ground Zero is still that deadly, doesn’t it make the situation for workers that much worse?