The widow of a New York Police Department detective who worked at Ground Zero says Mayor Zohran Mamdani quoted her late husband at a dedication ceremony for the NYPD’s new 9/11 Memorial Wall this week, even though the city has denied her survivor benefits 13 times and her husband’s name is not on the wall.
Cathy Hanson’s husband, ESU Detective Mike Hanson, spent nine months working at Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks. He later died of ALS. At the memorial dedication, Mamdani quoted him directly: “In the words of ESU Detective Mike Hanson, who before he passed gave his younger officers a rule to work by: ‘Do what you can for who you can, with whatever it takes,'” the mayor said.
Hanson says the quote left a false impression with anyone watching who didn’t already know her husband’s case.
“People that didn’t know anything and watched that conference would assume that the guys mentioned by Mamdani are up on that wall,” Hanson said. “All they had to do was Google Mike’s name and that he was denied.”
“All they had to do was look up on that wall and know that Mike’s name wasn’t there,” she said.
An eight-year fight over benefits
Hanson has been denied survivor benefits 13 times because ALS is not recognized as a qualifying 9/11-related condition under current city policy, she says.
“I’m really upset. We were denied 13 times. This has been an eight-year battle,” Hanson told News 12.
She says she intends to keep pressing the fight in her husband’s name.
“It keeps me going because I promised Mike that I would fight for him and for all others that came after him,” Hanson said. “I have never broken a promise.”
Hanson said the illness that killed her husband is not an isolated case among those who worked at Ground Zero.
“So many of his friends have come down with Parkinson’s and dementia and all of these neurological illnesses, and their families are going through the same thing that I’m going through,” Hanson said. “I know it’s from that day. From his time down there. I just know it.”
Mixed reaction to records release
Hanson offered qualified praise for a separate move by the Mamdani administration: the release of more than 170,000 pages of previously unpublished records on air quality around Ground Zero in the months following the attacks.
“I’m very happy that they released all these files the other day that showed about the air quality, which we knew all along,” Hanson said.
The Mamdani administration is not responsible for the benefits decisions themselves, which stem from existing city policy on qualifying conditions rather than any action taken by the current mayor. City Hall Deputy Press Secretary Sam Raskin responded to Hanson’s criticism by saying the administration is “looking into the details of (her late husband’s) case.”
Add comment