NYC street renamed after hero NYPD detective and crusader for 9/11 survivors
The legacy of a hero NYPD detective and crusader for 9/11 survivors was immortalized Saturday as a street near her beloved Williamsburg Houses was renamed in her honor.
Scores of people attended the ceremony at the corner of Scholes and Humboldt Sts., which is now called “Detective Barbara Taylor-Burnette Place.”
Burnette, 58, died Dec. 30 after a long and debilitating battle with 9/11-related health issues linked to her 23 daunting days at Ground Zero.
Despite suffering both interstitial lung disease and lung cancer, Burnette was a staunch heath care advocate for survivors suffering from 9/11-related illnesses and made two trips to Washington D.C. to demand full funding for the Zadroga Act.
“She always thought of others before she thought of herself,” said Burnette’s husband Lebro “Lee” Burnette, a retired NYPD detective who warned her against testifying before Congress in her push to get more health care funding.
“You can stay home. I’m going,” she told her concerned husband. “It’s the right thing to do.”
“She was very driven,” Lebro said. “I married well over my head. That’s what made losing her so difficult.”
The street renaming was just paces from the Williamsburg Houses, where Burnette grew up, and St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church, where her funeral was held.
“We’re still mourning her loss,” said Lebro Burnette, whose three daughters were at his side Saturday.
But with the street renaming, his wife will always be remembered in the community she cherished, he said.
“It’s almost like she’s still alive,” he said.
The veteran cop was working in the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau on 9/11, and traveled with several fellow officers by boat from Sunset Park, Brooklyn to the downtown Manhattan site — arriving just as the 110-story buildings toppled. She spent the next 12 hours working in the toxic air while helping evacuate a pregnant woman and several other people back to Brooklyn by boat.
Det. Burnette returned to Ground Zero only hours later on Sept. 12 and then for weeks after, constantly spitting the toxic soot from her mouth and throat while working without a protective mask, she recalled.
“I had to constantly get my eyes washed out,” she told the Daily News in 2015. “I was doing a lot of coughing, a lot of spitting up. I didn’t think about it because I wanted to help others.”
But the seasoned detective never saw herself as a hero, said lower Manhattan attorney and 9/11 advocate Nicholas Papain, who fought for the approval of the Zadroga Act at Burnette’s side.
“She had a deep conviction to serve. It was just a part of her,” Papain said. “We asked her to testify (in Washington D.C.) and she was all too happy to do so. She felt she was serving her community.”
Her last public appearance came just before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, with Burnette wearing an oxygen mask in her wheelchair.
“She didn’t allow that to be the story,” Papain remembered. “The story about those who continued to suffer and this heinous terror attack. Yet she still had that smile on her face she always had, even though you knew those illnesses were just eating her away.
“Every time she came to the office, she had a smile on her face and you would forget how sick she was,” he recalled. “She was always so positive, always optimistic.”
