A hometown hero: Honoring a fallen FDNY firefighter

Billy Moon joined America’s greatest fire department in 2002. There is no formal count of the number of lives he saved in the 20 years since. That’s the way things work in the FDNY. Emergencies happen. Rescues happen. The job is never done.

Monday in his Crown Heights firehouse, he fell as part of a training exercise that would’ve helped equip him to save still more lives. He and his comrades were learning how to rescue window washers trapped on immobile platforms when he fell from the makeshift scaffolding. In figuring out how to be there for others in their hour of desperate need, he sustained fatal injuries.

Now, his wife Kristina says her husband will donate his organs, the final demonstration that until his very last moments on the planet, even after, he wanted, needed, to be of use to others.

Moon was a 47-year-old man, married with two young children. There are many who fit this profile in New York City and in Moon’s Long Island home of Islip. But the few and proud suit up daily to rush into the buildings of strangers, where smoke accumulates and deadly heat builds and roofs collapse, where peril is on every floor and around every corner. Indeed, Moon not only raced to emergencies in Brooklyn and Queens over the course of his career. That seemingly wasn’t enough for him; as a volunteer firefighter, he served the people of Islip, too. In 2017, he was the department’s chief.

It is a blessing when a man finds a calling that he can call a career. It is a double blessing when this calling is of service to the wider community. It is a triple blessing when the service is so profound it removes people from deadly peril.

There are countless New Yorkers alive and healthy, about to hug their families and open their presents, because Billy Moon did the job he loved. His life was a gift.