By Steven Goode
The Hour, Norwalk, Conn.
NORTH HAVEN, Conn. — One day in September 2001, Tom DaCosta was a New York City Police Department recruit working a night shift at the academy. Two days later, following the attacks, he was patrolling a nearly empty Grand Central Terminal, watching for signs of further terrorism.
“It was surreal,” DaCosta said, recalling watching people hang pictures of missing loved ones and hearing sobs in what he said had become a giant mausoleum on Sept. 12 .
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DaCosta, 56, of North Haven, was two months into a second career in public service when he was thrown into active duty with the NYPD following the attacks on the Twin Towers.
He had spent the previous nine years as an artilleryman in the U.S. Marine Corps.
“I wanted the personal challenge,” he said of the decision to enlist. “But it was peacetime. In 1988, there was no war.”
His service included eight months of combat in the Gulf War from 1990 to 1991.
DaCosta is now commander of the New Haven VFW Post 12150, which was formed in 2015 ostensibly for post-911 veterans. DaCosta said he was drawn to the group because of its focus on helping veterans in need and performing community service.
After his own military service he decided he wanted to become a police officer.
“My dad was an East Haven cop,” DaCosta said. “I wanted to get into law enforcement.”
DaCosta, who was living in West Haven at the time, got a heads up from a high school friend who was already a police officer that the NYPD was hiring. He applied and was accepted into a class of 1,800 members that had to be divided into two groups that would alternate weeks of training by day and by night.
DaCosta was on the night shift the week of Sept. 11 and got home around 2 a.m. on Sept. 10.
The next morning when the first plane hit, his wife, Amy, a research administrator at the West Haven VA Hospital , paged him. DaCosta recalled deciding to call her back once he got up for the day. Fifteen minutes later the pager went off multiple times and his landline began ringing with the news of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center .
A few hours later he was in the Bronx awaiting orders.
The next day he was assigned to patrol Grand Central. DaCosta and others spent a month with that assignment before returning to the academy.
Some of his classmates would be assigned to search for survivors and remove bodies from Ground Zero and would go on to have serious health problems later in life. DaCosta said about 150 of his classmates have died from mysterious ailments as a result.
“We gained real world experience,” DaCosta said, likening it to going to boot camp, being sent to war halfway through and then going back and finishing boot camp.
“It doesn’t make much sense,” he said.
But it did make sense for the police department to change its training tactics from theft and unruly behavior to making sure no one ever got a bomb on a subway train.
“Yeah, we wanted to reduce crime, but terrorism was always the main job,” he said.
DaCosta went on to spend 24 years as a New York City transit cop, including time working with a bomb-sniffing Labrador named Skeeter and finishing as a deputy inspector in charge of 80 officers. During his time on the job, the department went from no bomb-sniffing dogs to 50 of them.
Today, he works with a many post-9/11 veterans. He believes that the aftermath of the attacks, especially when the sadness and shock of the events turned to anger and determination, contributed to people deciding to enlist.
“Patriotism was in and that influenced them,” he said.
But DaCosta is also concerned that only 25 years later, fewer young people are aware of what happened in 2001.
“It’s important to keep remembering,” he said. “People are still dying.”
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