Firefighter Michael Boyle

NEW YORK NEWSDAY, January 29, 2002

Side by Side, Both In Life and Death

By DENNIS DUGGAN

January 29, 2002 -- NEW YORK -- His firefighter son and his son's lifelong pal had rushed down 40 flights of stairs in the World Trade Center and were in the lobby of the north tower.

"They were inches away from escaping," Jimmy Boyle said yesterday of his son, Michael, and Michael's friend, David Arce.

Jimmy Boyle learned this from another firefighter, Lt. Warren Smith, who wrote Boyle a poignant three-page letter describing the day the Trade Center "shook like a rag doll" and collapsed.

Michael Boyle and David Arce were trapped together in the collapse, and it wasn't until this weekend that their bodies were recovered in the southwest corner of the north tower lobby. Now, the two will be buried together in a Westbury cemetery.

Smith, Boyle and Arce were in the Trade Center together. Smith was with Ladder 9, which shared a house with Engine 33, where Boyle and Arce worked.

"He was with them all the way down from the 40th floor," said Jimmy Boyle, a retired firefighter and former union president. "He made it to safety but Michael and David didn't."

Michael Boyle and David Arce had been inseparable since junior high school in Westbury, where they first met. They took the firefighters test together and they could be found at Mets games together. They even went to the same dentist. They were so close that Arce's mother, Margaret, called them "the Bobbsey Twins."

They will remain close, with both men's parents planning to bury them alongside each other in Cemetery of the Holy Rood.

Both men were eulogized at an emotional memorial Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in November, where Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) called them the "first soldiers to die in the first great war of the 21st century."

"They were so close to getting out alive," King said yesterday.

Margaret Arce said uniformed members of Engine 33 in Manhattan told her Saturday that DNA tests had confirmed her son had been found.

The same day, Jimmy Boyle was told that his son's remains had been discovered, but the Fire Department was awaiting DNA tests for a positive identification.

"I am sure that it's my son," Boyle said yesterday, "because his uniform was found as well."

Yesterday, Margaret Arce spent part of the day visiting the site where David and Michael will be buried.

"My son has already been identified and now we're waiting for the DNA tests to confirm Michael," she said.

"We are not going to have a funeral; this will be a graveside ceremony," said Boyle, who works for Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. "I don't know if I could go through something as emotional again."

For both parents, the discovery of their sons' remains was "bittersweet closure," Boyle said.

Boyle had spent weeks searching for Michael, becoming one of many firefighter parents who went each day to the sorrow-soaked site of the terrorist attack, digging, searching, even calling for their lost children.

The day of the attack, Jimmy Boyle got a call from Michael, who said that he and David were getting ready to go to Woodside to pass out campaign literature for Matthew J. Farrell, a relative who was running for the City Council.

That was at 8:35 a.m. and the call was from the firefighters' house on Great Jones Street. But duty pre-empted their plans and both men ran into the infernos.

For the two parents, the long months between the reported loss of their sons and the weekend discovery of their remains have been filled with pain and regret for the unfulfilled promise of both their lives.

"This never ends," Margaret said yesterday. She was already busy rewriting her son's death certificate.

"It now reads, 'Not found,'" she said. "I am changing that. Now it will read 'Found.'"

For weeks after her son's death, Margaret Arce went to her son's $1,000-a-month apartment in Stuyvesant Town to pack his belongings, a sad ritual familiar to many parents. She spoke of a glittering future for her son, whose firefighter friends had dubbed him "Buddha" because he was so quiet.

"He was going to take a lieutenant's exam in January," she said.

Michael Boyle had been making plans to marry Rosemary Kenny, and Jimmy Boyle recalled that David Arce would sometimes join the pair on their dates.

When I talked to Margaret in January, her son's remains were still missing, but she was hoping that searchers would find him.

"If not, then I think they're in heaven raising hell together," she said at the time.

But there are things to be done here on earth. David Arce's remains are at the city morgue, awaiting confirmation of Michael Boyle's identity and burial together.

"It's only fitting," Jimmy Boyle said.

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