Police Captain Kathy Mazza Assignment on September 11, 2001:

Port Authority Police Academy HQ, Jersey City, NJ

Police Captain Kathy Mazza Assignment on September 11, 2001: Port Authority Police Academy HQ, Jersey City, NJ Kathy Mazza From Police Heroes, a book by author Chuck Whitlock:

Captain Kathy Mazza, forty-six, was the first female commanding officer of the Port Authority Police Academy. On September 11, she joined her colleagues at the scene. When there was a bottleneck of people at the revolving doors in the North Tower, she shot out the floor-to-ceiling glass walls on the mezzanine. Her action allowed hundreds of people to escape. She was last seen with Lieutenant Robert Cirri as they were helping carry a woman down the stairs when the building collapsed.

Captain Mazza grew up in Massapequa, New York, with three brothers. After she graduated from Nassau Community College, she was an operating room nurse at two New York hospitals, the Long Island Jewish Hospital in Queens and St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York. In 1987, after ten years of working as a cardiothoracic nurse in the operating room, she enrolled in the Port Authority Police Academy. She patrolled JFK Airport for a year, worked in the central police pool for one year, then returned to JFK Airport for the next six years. She was promoted to sergeant in 1994 and was assigned to the Police Academy for three years and was promoted to lieutenant in December 1998 while at the academy. Her next assignment was the Staten Island Bridges/New Jersey Marine Terminals command.

In April 2000 she became one of only two female captains in the Port Authority, which at the time had fourteen male captains. In 1992, she had open-heart surgery to correct a quarter-size hole. A year later, she saved her mother’s life by recognizing what her mother’s chest pains meant – that her arteries were blocked. During her career with the Port Authority, she supervised the agency’s first-aid programs and certified first responder and EMT training. She also taught emergency medical service programs at the Port Authority Police Academy. In 1999 the Regional Emergency Medical Services Council of New York City named Captain Mazza its Basic Life Support Provider of the Year based on her work on the use of portable heart defibrillators. The training program she initiated in 1997 for six hundred officers to use defibrillators in airports has saved at least thirteen lives.

Captain Mazza was married to Christopher Delosh for sixteen years. He is a police officer of the New York Police Department working at the 25th Precinct in Harlem. At a memorial service for emergency service workers, Mayor Guiliani said of Mazza, as reported by the New York Post: “She was a trailblazer with a career that was truly unique. She had an incredible desire to help people.

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If you plan on visiting the September 11 Memorial & Museum, Kathy's location designation is S-29 (South Pool - First Responders) For more information and tickets, please visit the web site by clicking on the link - http://www.911memorial.org/

S-29 Exact Location and general information about Kathy, Click on the photo below

She's an American Hero