Funeral for firefighter, nearly four years after 9/11

One of the last funerals for a firefighter killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks was held today for a Montserrat native who had followed his father into the fire department.

Keithroy Maynard, one of the 343 firefighters killed at the World Trade Centre site, was memorialised at a church service in Manhattan.

Like other relatives of September 11 victims, Maynard’s family held a memorial service two months after the attacks, but years more passed before they felt that enough of his remains had been identified to hold a formal funeral, officials said.

Today, hundreds of firefighters stood in full dress uniform under an unforgiving June sun as a fire truck carrying Maynard’s remains paraded to the Church of the Master, with a pipe and drum corps playing Amazing Grace.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, attending the funeral on his daughter’s wedding day, was among the mourners who honoured Maynard, 30, as a hero whose final gift to the city has not faded with time.

“If there is any comfort to be taken,” Bloomberg said to Maynard’s mother, “perhaps it is that your son died doing what he loved.”

Maynard was among seven members of Engine Co 33 to die in the towers’ collapse.

Maynard, a naturalised US citizen, will be buried in Monserrat, a volcanic island in the Caribbean where he lived until he was 15.

The ceremony was the first funeral since 2003 for a firefighter killed at the World Trade Centre.

It was prompted, in part, by a decision by city forensic investigators in February to end their efforts to identify remains collected from the Twin Towers rubble. More than 1,100 victims remain unidentified, but officials concluded they had exhausted all current DNA technology.

Firefighting was in Maynard’s blood. His late father, Reynold White, was a New York City fire captain. His twin brother, Kevin Maynard, became a firefighter in Houston after his brother’s death.

Another brother, Duane White, is a New York police officer.

Maynard is also survived by his mother, another brother, two sisters and a 10-year-old son, Keithroy Maynard II, who was six when his father died.