Retired firefighter created bronze honoring chaplain killed in Sept. 11, 2001 attacks
Twenty-five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Sedona resident Dennis Burke has finished the tribute he began in their aftermath.
Burke, 63, is a retired Fire Department of the City of New York firefighter born and raised in Brooklyn.
He returned to St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Midtown Manhattan on Aug. 11 to unveil “Brotherhood 9/11,” his first bronze sculpture, and the product of a craft he took up in 1996 under John Soderberg, the late Sedona and Verde Valley sculptor.
“Brotherhood 9/11 is the tribute I’ve created following a 20-year journey to honor Father Mychal Judge and the 343 members of the New York City fire department who made the ultimate sacrifice on Sept. 11, 2001,” Burke said during the ceremony.
Judge was a 68-year-old Franciscan priest who was at the North Tower lobby Command Center administering prayers to victims during the Sept. 11 attack. When the South Tower collapsed, debris crashed into the North Tower lobby and Judge was struck and killed. He is recorded as Victim 0001, the first victim of the attacks issued a death certificate by the New York City Office of the Medical Examiner.
“He just saw us as children of one God … there was such a Christ-like presence to him. Mychal Judge smiled, and laughed, and sang. And just had such a joy of life that you really almost feel that if you gotta go through hell, it’s nice to have Mychal Judge at your side,” Judge’s friend Vina Drennan wrote on the 9/11 Memorial and Museum’s website.
“This is always a difficult time of the year for me, which is why I’m sort of happy that they decided to do the unveiling last month,” Burke said. “That was a dream that goes back almost 25 years, that I always wanted the first one to be in Father Mychal’s church, because they have this beautiful alcove that has a memorial to 9/11.”
About 200 attendees came out to the Aug. 11 ceremony at St. Francis of Assisi to unveil the memorial alcove to the victims of 9/11, with other artifacts from the World Trade Center, such as a San Damiano Cross cut into a World Trade Center I-Beam and Judge’s FDNY dress helmet.
“After a night of prayer and contemplation following the horrific events of 9/11, a vision came to me of our beloved Fire Department Chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, comforting our firefighter brothers who would perish and consoling survivors left to face the unthinkable,” Burke’s artist statement reads. “‘Brotherhood 9/11′ embodies my conception with the fallen firefighter reaching out, the rescuers’ anguish, their sense of being embraced by a divine presence and Father Mychal’s gentle touch of guiding grace.”
Burke got to know Judge in the emergency room at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx after Burke—working with Ladder 58—was injured Aug. 19, 1992, fighting a four-alarm tenement fire that sent 38 firefighters to the hospital.
“I fractured my back and had a few burns,” Burke said. “The physical recovery was long, and I ultimately had to have back surgery in 2008. But the emotional cost was that I lost a job I absolutely loved.
“I went before the medical review board, and they asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to go back to the firehouse.’ And they said, ‘You’re never going back to the firehouse.'”
Faith has been the constant through all of it. Burke added that his life is in God’s hands.
Burke retired from FDNY in 1994, and relocated to Arizona in 1995 for the weather. He befriended Soderberg at a health club in the Village of Oak Creek after Burke purchased Soderberg’s work “Storyteller,” that now adorns his living room.
“It’s the story of creation from the Tewa people,” Burke said. What sold him was “the story behind it, and also the detail in the hands.” He added: “I was totally fascinated by the amount of detail in the hands and the fingernails, and the amount of work that went into it.”
“I always used to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I was always enamored with sculpture, and I’m a huge fan of Michelangelo, but at that point I never thought that I would become a sculptor,” Burke said.
Soderberg invited Burke out to his studio in Camp Verde to see how his work was done. Burke told him about the fire and the FDNY, and Soderberg, taken with the idea of a New York City firefighter in his shop, asked whether he wanted to learn to sculpt.
“I can’t even draw,” Burke said. “My first piece was going to be my wife Trish and son Brian as a nursing piece, and then we kind of got sidelined for many years. Everything went on the back burner, and then I started on ‘Brotherhood 9/11’.”
Burke met his wife Patricia through a mutual friend while on vacation in Ireland in 1996. They married March 13, 1999, and the couple’s son Brian was born later that year. Brian Burke is a former Sedona Red Rock News journalism intern. He became a firefighter and paramedic, first with the Copper Canyon Fire and Medical District and now Sedona Fire District since December.
“Pride for both of us is an understatement,” Dennis Burke said. “My father was a cop, and I grew up in a predominantly cop neighborhood in Brooklyn. So when Brian wanted to pursue this career, I was wholeheartedly in favor of it. And he actually got into it literally by accident.”
Brian Burke’s career in fire service started on May 28, 2021, with the death of Joanna Wheaton, 29, who was crossing an intersection at Beaver Street and Butler Avenue in Flagstaff. A driver ran a red light, killing Wheaton and injuring three others, including rapper Andres “Dapper Dre” Adauto, who also lost a leg in the crash.
Wheaton was standing “right in front of me,” Brian Burke wrote to her family on June 3, 2021.
“I don’t know how to say this but Joanna died a hero,” Brian Burke wrote. “She saved my life, if Joanna would have moved right one foot at the light I would have been under that truck and my parents would be here under very different circumstances. I did not know Joanna but I will always remember her as the woman who saved my life” on that day.
The next day, Patricia Burke said, Brian told them: “That’s it. I want to help people in their time of need. I want to be a first-responder.”