Bin Laden's Death Stirs Memories for Seabrook Residents

Seabrook resident Bert Barry said he was taken by surprise when he heard the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

Barry, whose son Arthur was one of the 343 firefighters who lost their lives in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, said he was “glad they got him.” Arthur was 35 at the time.

“It’s not closure,” Barry explained, “because we’ll never forget.”

Lou Bopp, who also lives in the Tinton Falls retirement community, said on Monday that he thought Bin Laden should have been kept alive. “But ultimately, something was going to kill him: a noose, an injection, whatever.”

Bopp spent the days and weeks following the World Trade Center attack on his 32-foot boat, that he kept docked in Oceanport, assisting with rescue and relief operations in and around the New York Harbor.

"It was a horror show," Bopp said of the smoke and ash-filled air that covered their faces as they guarded the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

A member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary and a Little Silver resident at the time, Bopp shuttled loads of Port Authority Police, New York City firemen and even giant pieces of equipment from one point to another, with his wife Trudy as one of crew members.

“People were so different in New York that day,” Bopp remembered. “If you were in uniform, you were treated like a king.”

A number of years after the attacks, Barry said that during a clean up at his son’s old company—Ladder 15 on South Street in lower Manhattan—members discovered Arthur’s equipment, which he hadn’t put on that day.

Barry, who had by then moved from Staten Island to Seabrook, decided to take his son’s gear to the local firehouse to see if they could use it.

Instead, members from the Wayside Fire Company installed a display just inside their entrance of Arthur’s jacket with a NYFD helmet with “343” emblazoned on its front—signifying the number of firefighters killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Now, Barry’s developed a relationship with Wayside members and even helped them acquire steel beams from the fallen towers to use for a planned memorial to fallen firefighters behind the firehouse along Asbury Avenue.

Barry said that the news of Bin Laden’s death didn’t conjure any big emotions.

“But I couldn’t even go to bereavement (after the loss of my son),” he said. “I get more choked up when I go to the firehouse.”