Even though he contracted cancer caused by exposure to the toxic dust from the World Trade Center terrorist attack on 9/11, New York Police Department Transit Chief Joseph Gulotta says he’d respond in exactly the same way if he had it to do over again.
“I want our young officers never to forget this, to know that they may be called to do this. And I tell them all the same thing every time,” Chief Gulotta says in a video recalling the challenge he faced on that fateful day:
“I would have responded exactly the same way. My city and my country needed me.
“I responded with thousands of my brothers and sisters to the site. We kept it safe. We saved as many people as we could.”
“When everyone else was running away, we ran to the danger,” Gulotta recalls.
Gulotta and tens of thousands of others who inhaled the carcinogen-filled dust cloud from the suicide bombing of the World Trade Center were later diagnosed with cancer. The number of 9/11-related cancer victims continues to grow even today, 25 years later.
After Gulotta had surgery to treat his cancer, a doctor later offered to remove the scar left by the surgery – but, Chief Gulotta chose to keep it.
“That helps me remember; I don’t want to forget,” Gulotta told the doctor.
“It’s a reality we have to live with,” the NYPD transit chief explains in the video posted on his department’s X.com account embedded below.
Chief of Transit Joseph Gulotta will never forget responding to the World Trade Center on 9/11.
He was diagnosed with cancer, related to his time at Ground Zero.
Thousands share a similar story.
Still, he says he never regrets helping his city when it needed him the most. pic.twitter.com/urqfOpkiYK— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) September 9, 2026
