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Mostly Cloudy State Senate approves second version of Brady Bill
Nearly two weeks after the State Assembly passed a new version of a bill that would include the name of fallen Malverne firefighter Paul Brady on a memorial wall in Albany, the State Senate has passed its own companion bill.
Senate Bill 7458, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre), was passed on June 12.
The legislation states that any firefighter who is killed due to services performed in the line of duty will be added to the New York State Fallen Firefighters Memorial on the Empire State Plaza in Albany. The memorial is dedicated to more than 2,000 firefighters who have died while on the job.
“Our firefighters put their lives on the line each and every time they respond to a distress call,” Skelos said in a statement. “They all deserve our respect, and those [who] give their lives in the service of others while in the line of duty deserve to be included in a lasting memorial such as the New York State Fallen Firefighters Memorial.”
The bill was written after Brady, 42, a volunteer firefighter, died while on duty in the Malverne firehouse in July 2006. He was accidentally crushed to death while doing routine maintenance on the roof of a rescue truck. A fellow volunteer, unaware that Brady was on top of the truck, drove it out of the building, trapping Brady in a 5-inch clearance between the truck and a ceiling beam. He suffered internal injuries and died later at Nassau University Medical Center.
Since then, the Malverne F.D. has fought to get Brady’s name added to the memorial wall, and has been denied five times by the memorial’s selection committee, even though state and federal law designated Brady’s death as having happened in the line of duty. His name is inscribed in the U.S. Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Maryland.
Both Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg (D-Long Beach), who sponsored the Assembly version of the bill, and Skelos previously told the Herald that there seemed to be an “inherent inequity” in the way fallen firefighters are honored in the state.
