Former 50th Precinct sergeant Luis Lopez honored for 9/11 rescue and recovery work

Luis Lopez spent the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, guarding Riverdale and the surrounding northwest Bronx in the aftermath of the terror attacks. As a sergeant with the New York Police Department’s 50th Precinct, his post that day was to help secure the precinct and the bridges leading into the area as the city braced for what might come next.

The NYPD did not initially assign Lopez to ground zero, but he made his way downtown anyway. In the months that followed, his nephew Charlie Salamanca said, Lopez volunteered to help, ultimately working at the disaster site two to three times a week. His wife, Jacqui Lopez Papadatos, said those assignments continued for roughly three to five months, with Lopez securing the perimeter of the debris pile and helping direct officers and traffic around Lower Manhattan.

In the years that followed, Papadatos said, it was the dust Lopez remembered. And it was that exposure that ultimately claimed his life years later.

She recalled him describing how it hung in the air, settled across the surrounding neighborhood and seemed impossible to escape. When workers stopped to eat, Lopez told her, even the food seemed covered in it. In those first days after Sept. 11, the breathing protection generally available to many people at ground zero consisted largely of surgical masks and paper dust masks.

For more than a decade afterward, Lopez remained the strong, athletic man his family had always known. He exercised regularly, Salamanca said, sometimes running several miles before work and again afterward. Policing had become the career around which much of his life was built.

Lopez was born in the Bronx in 1964. His mother died when he was an infant, Papadatos said, and he later went to live with relatives in Yauco, Puerto Rico, where he spent his middle and high school years. He returned to New York as a young man and worked a string of jobs, including as a cashier at Burger King, a detail Salamanca remembered because his uncle remained fiercely loyal to the chain over McDonald’s.

Lopez was appointed Jan. 26, 1988, and assigned as a police officer to Transit District 1, according to the NYPD, when the Transit Police still operated separately from the department. He was later promoted to sergeant and, from July 1, 1998, through Dec. 22, 2006, was assigned to the 50th Precinct, where Papadatos said he worked in the anti-crime unit.

“Being a police officer was everything to him,” Papadatos said. “He absolutely adored it. He loved feeling like he could make a difference in the community.”

Even an arrest, she said, could become an opportunity for Lopez to reach someone. He would talk to people he arrested about what they could do differently with their lives, and some later approached him to say those conversations had stayed with them.

The first sign that something was wrong came in May 2012, nearly 11 years after the attacks. Lopez developed a cough that seemed to come from nowhere and refused to let up. Within days, Papadatos said, he could no longer lie down to sleep. Instead, he sat hunched over the table in their Suffern home, leaning forward because it had become too difficult to breathe lying flat.

Doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital initially diagnosed him with pneumonia. When he failed to improve, Lopez spent about a week at Columbia Presbyterian. Still without answers, they returned to Good Samaritan, where Papadatos remembered a doctor looking at her husband and telling him plainly, “You’re very sick, and you need to be transferred to Mount Sinai.”

At Mount Sinai, which operates a World Trade Center Health Program Clinical Center of Excellence, doctors performed a lung biopsy and diagnosed Lopez with bronchiolitis obliterans organizing pneumonia, or BOOP.

Papadatos said doctors began questioning him about possible exposures. Had he worked around chemicals? Had he worked in a factory? Lopez had never smoked, she said, and nothing obvious in his everyday life appeared to explain what was happening. When doctors learned he had spent months working around the World Trade Center pile, Papadatos said, they attributed his illness to that exposure. The NYPD later recognized his condition as line-of-duty related, she said.

For Salamanca, the years between ground zero and his uncle’s illness were difficult to comprehend.

“How could he have gotten sick in 2012 from something that occurred 11 years prior?” he remembered wondering.

As Lopez’s lungs deteriorated, Papadatos said, his heart began failing, too. By Nov. 3, 2012, he had taken what she described as “a real bad turn.” Lopez returned to Mount Sinai and remained there for about eight months, undergoing multiple heart surgeries and spending extended periods in intensive care. At one point, Papadatos said, he spent roughly 120 consecutive days in the ICU, relying on a ventilator and tracheostomy. After months in a hospital bed, he lost the ability to walk.

Salamanca, then living in Jacksonville, Florida, flew north while his uncle was in a medically induced coma, unsure whether it would be the last time he saw him. When Lopez later appeared ready to return home in a wheelchair, Salamanca moved to New York to help care for him.

The family organized its days around Lopez’s bedside. Salamanca stayed during mornings, his mother often took overnight hours and Papadatos, then teaching in Yonkers, headed to the hospital after work. During those long stays, she covered the walls with photographs of her husband before he became sick: upright, healthy and strong.

When Lopez returned home in June 2013, he used a wheelchair and needed oxygen around the clock. A left ventricular assistance device helped his heart pump blood and had to remain connected to electricity or batteries. Salamanca moved in with the couple as hospital visits continued every few months.

“It was torture for him,” Papadatos said. “He was used to being the protector. He was a tall man — six-foot-one, athletic, strong — and he felt so low about himself, just laying in a bed, not being able to walk, not being able to breathe.”

On June 26, 2015, Lopez’s breathing became unbearable at home. Papadatos remembered him gasping for air before looking at her and saying, “I can’t do this anymore.”

They returned to the hospital, where Lopez was intubated for what would be the final time. When doctors told the family there was nothing more they could do, Papadatos, Salamanca, Lopez’s son Anthony and other relatives gathered at his bedside to say goodbye.

His death was recognized as line-of-duty related. A World Trade Center memorial for Lieutenant Luis A. Lopez lists him among members of the service involved in rescue and recovery efforts who were exposed to toxic and hazardous conditions and later died from 9/11-related illnesses.

Papadatos said Lopez received full line-of-duty funeral honors, with hundreds of officers lining the street outside Riverdale-on-Hudson, a helicopter circling overhead and an American flag folded and presented to her. His name was later added to law enforcement memorials at One Police Plaza, Battery Park, Albany, Washington and Rockland County.