By Anthony Rifilato
"He had three different scanners. If he heard about a fire, he'd get in his van and go at 2 a.m.," said Bill Werfelman, a former Baldwin fire chief and close friend of Lynch.
Lynch's heroic act did not go unnoticed.
"He kept the Newsday article on his office wall and received an award," Werfelman said. "There is not enough kind words to say about him."
On Sept. 12, Kevin Lynch died at North Shore University Hospital in Plainview after battling a rare form of cancer in his liver. He was
42 years old.
At 6-foot-7 and nearly 400 pounds, Lynch looked intimidating but had a soothing disposition and quickly put people at ease. So much so that friends call him a "gentle giant."
Lynch graduated from Uniondale High School, where he had played football, and went on to graduate from SUNY Stony Brook.
In his 20s, Lynch had started his own business, Shamrock Mechanical Engineering. In 1989, he eventually took a job as chief engineer for a building in Queens. The 14-story building at 80-02 Kew Gardens Road had prominent tenants such as the FBI, the Queens District Attorney, and Newsday.
"He ran the building," Werfelman said. "The tenants thought so highly of him that they would give him the keys to their office when they asked him to do remodeling and to fix things. They never asked him how much it would cost. As soon as he spoke it was so calm."
Lynch's interest in being a fireman goes a long way back.
"He had a lot of loves in life," Werfelman said. "His passion was the fire department. He wanted to be a fireman since he was a kid."
His father, Nassau County police officer Vincent F. Lynch, died when Lynch was 19-years-old. As an only child he took care of his mother Anne. He was very close to his mom and supporting her was a main concern of his. After getting an education and establishing a career, Lynch finally became a volunteer fireman 13 years ago at age 29.
The fire department became a second family to Lynch, whose own family was small and scattered.
"He would come after work to the fire department meetings at 8 p.m., stay at the meeting, then go straight back to work," Werfelman said, who explained that Lynch sometimes worked 70-90 hours a week.
Werfelman said that when Lynch was building a walk-in refrigerator for the fire house, nobody thought it would work because it looked like such a big job.
"He said, 'This is nothing, it's easy','" Werfelman said. The fridge
has been working for the past seven years. "He could build anything."
As a fireman, although calm and gentle, Lynch wasn't without humor.
"He was fun-loving and had the newest joke on the street," said Lt. John Cools, another close friend of Lynch. "We went everywhere with him. When we took him to a bar people would make way. He could drink two bottles of Budweiser at once."
Cools said that although Lynch dated, he never married and was "an only child taking care of mom."
Lynch was also a huge football and a Bill Elliot NASCAR fan. He loved Notre Dame and the Oakland Raiders.
"We chartered a bus to see Notre Dame play against Army, and Kevin was like a six-year-old on Christmas. It was just amazing," Werfelman said.
Friends said that Lynch was a very generous man who was willing to go out of his way for people.
"He was the type of guy that if a water pipe burst in your basement at 3:30 a.m. during a blizzard, he'd come to fix it," said Werfelman, who also noted that Lynch often gave food and clothing to the homeless.
"Once I needed to pick up my wife and daughter from the airport because my daughter was coming back from college," said Werfelman. "But he gave me his truck to pick them up. He would give you the shirt off his back."
Lynch became sick last spring, but didn't find out it was cancer until after Memorial Day. He was being treated at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan and then taken to North Shore, where he died. His colleagues from the fire department visited weekly, as did friends, family, and employees and cops from his building.
Services were held last week at St. Christopher's Roman Catholic Church, and he was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram.
