Mourners Gather for Funeral of New York Firefighter

Hundreds of firefighters, in their matching dress blues, mourned a fallen colleague on Thursday, honoring the memory of Lt. Gordon Matthew Ambelas, who died last weekend fighting a blaze at a Brooklyn high-rise building.

On a muggy summer day, a procession of relatives and public officials moved through the streets of southeastern Staten Island, past tents, tables and buckets of bottled water, before making their way into the Church of St. Clare on Nelson Avenue for the funeral Mass. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Fire Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro were among those who joined the rank-and-file firefighters.

Lieutenant Ambelas and others from Ladder Company 119 were the first to arrive — or the “first due,” in firefighting parlance — at 75 Wilson Street, a building in a public housing complex known as Independence Towers. He led other firefighters to the 19th floor, where the power cord of an air-conditioning unit in Apartment 19B had sparked the fire just after 9 p.m. on Saturday.

The blaze was unusually dangerous for firefighters, the Fire Department later said, because of the so-called Collyers’ mansion condition of the apartment, which was packed with the owner’s possessions.

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Lt. Gordon Matthew AmbelasCreditNew York Fire Department

A 14-year veteran of the department, the lieutenant was searching the one-bedroom unit for survivors when he was overcome by flames and smoke. Emergency workers rushed him to Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn, but his injuries proved fatal.

Lieutenant Ambelas was the first city firefighter to die in the line of duty in more than two years.

On Thursday, just before his coffin emerged from the Casey McCallum Rice Funeral Home, the firefighters lined six or seven deep along Nelson Avenue snapped to attention, their white-gloved hands balled up at their sides. They looked on silently as nine pallbearers from Lieutenant Ambelas’s Staten Island and Brooklyn firehouses loaded his coffin onto the back of a fire truck draped in purple and black bunting. It bore the words, “Lieutenant, Ladder 119.”

The nine saluted in unison, slowly, as others secured the coffin to the truck. Then everyone except the wall of firefighters standing at attention proceeded forward: fire trucks from both of his firehouses, green-kilted bagpipers, the pallbearers and more than a dozen vans carrying friends and relatives. The lieutenant’s wife, Nanette, and their two daughters, Gabriella, 8, and Giavanna, 5, rode in the front van.

As the coffin was carried into the church, pipers played “Amazing Grace” before a line of navy-uniformed firefighters. Mayor de Blasio followed with Commissioner Nigro. Salvatore J. Cassano, a former fire commissioner, was also in attendance with James Esposito, the head of the city’s Office of Emergency Management; James Oddo, the Staten Island borough president; Letitia James, the public advocate; Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker; Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller; and Representative Michael G. Grimm of Staten Island.

In an interview outside the church, Abraham Gottlieb, the father of Mendy Gottlieb, the 7-year-old boy whom Lieutenant .

“It’s very sad to attend the funeral of the man who saved my son’s life,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “Very sad.”

Mr. de Blasio was among the eulogists and addressed the mourners assembled in the church. “All members of the F.D.N.Y., but really, all New Yorkers, are feeling this moment with pain and sadness, because we’ve lost a true hero,” he said.

Lieutenant Ambelas’s life “embodied the values that we as New Yorkers cherish most,” he added, calling the firefighter hardworking and dedicated, a teacher, mentor, colleague and the consummate teammate, as well as a man who “always had a smile on his face and a warmth for others.”

During the fire on Saturday night, Mr. de Blasio recounted, “Matt’s only thoughts were for the safety of others.”

Source: The New York Times

“He plunged into the fire to search for life,” the mayor continued. “He led from the front, as great leaders do, as he always did — and then, very tragically, made the ultimate sacrifice at the age of only 40.”

Mr. Nigro and Jerry Tucker, Lieutenant Ambelas’s captain in Ladder Company 81, also spoke. But perhaps the most poignant tribute came from his wife, Nanette, whose eulogy was read aloud by a close family friend, Margaret Gulliksen.

“I wish you could save me now,” Ms. Ambelas had written. “How am I supposed to breathe without you? Who will pick me up when I fall?”

She described the love her husband had for their daughters — “Mr. Mom had nothing on you, Matt” — and his ideal day: cold Sam Adams beer, Metallica and Black Sabbath on the stereo, and family and friends. “You were taken too early from the family that loved you and needed you,” she wrote. “I will be counting the time until I am in your arms.”

It was a ritual on a larger scale than the ones that took place the day after the fire at Lieutenant Ambelas’s firehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and his former firehouse on Staten Island: the ceremonial hanging of purple and black mourning bunting. Crowds of firefighters came to pay their respects there, as did members of Williamsburg’s Hasidic Jewish community, some of whom had met Lieutenant Ambelas after he rescued the Gottlieb boy from a roll-down gate.

On Staten Island, relatives and friends had gone to the Ambelas family’s two-story house to grieve. The Ambelases had been married for almost 10 years.

The day after her husband’s death, Ms. Ambelas posted a note on her Facebook page. “You were my everything and the rock of this family,” it read. “We will be together again.”

“Until then,” she added, “I will raise our girls to make you proud.”

At the end of the funeral, Lieutenant Ambelas’s coffin left the church the way it had entered, with pallbearers from both his firehouses carrying it. White-robed priests sprinkled it with holy water. A trumpeter played taps. And two firefighters presented his daughters, Gabriella and Giavanna, with black helmets emblazoned with his two ladder company numbers — 81 and 119.