An FDNY EMS Lieutenant whose partner died when the Twin Towers fell is the latest death of the toxic dust at Ground Zero, according to her family.Forty-six-year-old Lt. Edith Torres, of Queens, died Wednesday of a Sept. 11-related illness, according to FDNY and union officials. Torres, like so many other FDNY members was off-duty when the hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center, but responded anyway, said her brother, Jose Torres, a retired NYPD officer.“She had called me, probably around 6, 7 o’clock at night to see how I was doing,” said Torres. “She told me that things were very rough, things were very bad, it was a war zone, it was chaos and that she was exhausted but that she had work to do. Her partner at Battalion 49 in Astoria, Paramedic Carlos Lillo, 37, perished while looking for his wife, who worked in the North Tower. Alongside him was Paramedic Ricardo Quinn.“She was trying to get in contact with him,” Torres said. “The buildings had collapsed, and she had not known at the time what happened.”
Lieutenant Torres, a 23-year-veteran, was promoted in 2005, and worked in Emergency Medical Dispatch, helping field units on cardiac arrest calls and other medical emergencies.She learned she had a rare, fast-spreading form of cervical cancer in October, her brother said. She was also a member of several NYC volunteer EMS agencies. RIP.
