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Tunnel to Towers 5K Run & Walk - NEW YORK CITY

Sun September 29, 2024 Brooklyn, NY 11231 US Directions
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#TullyStrong

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Since 2021 #TullyStrong has raised 45,000 dollars let’s see what we can do in 2024!!!

Our story, written by NY Newsday reporter John Valenti III 8/2021

That morning she was on the train out of Little Neck, bound for Manhattan and the ferry across the Hudson to her job in Weehawken, N.J., knowing her husband was still at home, hard asleep, after a long day working the night shift for the NYPD.

This was almost 20 years ago now and as the train came around the bend, Agnes Tully, listening as she did to Howard Stern, saw smoke rising from the North Tower of the World Trade Center and thought how terrible — that there must be a fire at Windows on the World. By the time she was in the middle of the Hudson, she knew it something far more catastrophic, and so when she finally reached her newlywed husband, Chris Tully told her just what she'd expected. "He said, 'I'm on my way down, I'm on my way,'" she recalled this week.

Agnes Tully said she felt overwhelming relief when she heard from him again late that night, her hunkered down with family in Pennsylvania, him explaining how he’d made it into Lower Manhattan — then made it home safe on a day that had taken so many. But neither knew the terrible seed that had been planted, that would take root in the weeks and years to come, as Chris Tully worked sifting through remains, first at Ground Zero and later at the forensic yard at Fresh Kills on Staten Island, leading to the cancer that would take him all these years later.

Retired Det. Sgt. Christopher Michael Tully, who served with the NYPD Intelligence Bureau, died Saturday after a four-year battle with 9/11-related cancer. He was 52. He leaves behind his wife Agnes, their son Connor, 15, his mother, Barbara Tully, and, as friend Hon. Andrew A. Crecca, District Administrative Judge, Tenth Judicial District, Suffolk County, said, a countless number who considered him a brother.

"He was a family man, he was the best of friends," Agnes Tully said. "He loved his job, no matter how bad, and I don't know how a cop could love the job, sometimes, but he did. He was an amazing person … He just loved life."

Born Feb. 15, 1969, Chris Tully grew up in Glen Oaks, lone child of a single mother, graduating Martin Van Buren High School, later taking classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He was already with the NYPD when he met Agnes Petronzio, though the two of them had lived their entire lives up the block from one another on 73rd Avenue in G.O. She was five years his junior, but the two had mutual friends, and one night he sat down at her table at a bar in Bayside.

This was October, 1997. Two days later, she said, he called and asked her out.

"He had such a beautiful smile," she said, recalling a conversation they had about his philosophy on life. "You don't cut corners," he told her, "you do it right the first time.” When he asked her out again, he said, "You can come over and I'll make you dinner." She'd asked if he planned on heating up something in the microwave. Little did she know how good a cook he was, how serious he was about all he did. "For an Irishman," she said, "he made the best Italian."

She laughed about how she later became his sous chef.

At the time, Tully had just been promoted out of Street Crimes. As the relationship bloomed, he decided to ask Agnes to marry him on New Year's Eve, 1999 into 2000, Y2K, but had to work, couldn’t get out of it, so he proposed on Christmas Eve 1999, instead.

Of course, she said yes. They got married May 11, 2001.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Chris Tully, as did his fellow cops and firemen and volunteers, worked the pile at Ground Zero, and then he worked for weeks at the yard on Staten Island, where the rubble and debris and remains had been brought. Agnes Tully wondered how he could bear it. "'This is what you do,'" he told her, '"you've got to get answers for the families.' I couldn't even wrap my head around it … But that was Chris."

You can tell from all the photos she took of him -- and, Agnes took thousands -- just how much Chris Tully loved life. And how much he loved being a cop.

It's obvious from the one of him, in full dress uniform, with his shield and departmental ribbons and, of course, his shamrock. He's fighting hard not to smirk, like he knows something Agnes knows, like there's all that unspoken between them.

Over the years, Chris and Agnes and Connor traveled, buying a motor home and converting it to a 4x4, spending time on the beach in Montauk, or out in Greenport, or down in North Carolina or any of a dozen other places.

Then in April 2017 a PSA test came back "with a blip," Agnes Tully said, hinting he might have prostate cancer, one of the many cancers related to 9/11. Soon there was a biopsy. By July, Chris Tully found out he was at Stage 1. By the time he got to Sloan Kettering in August he was diagnosed at Stage 4.

He went through experimental treatments, clinical trials, anything and everything, Agnes Tully said, as he fought to live. One experimental medicine was so toxic Chris Tully went blind for five days. Still, Agnes said, her husband cherished every moment he could with family, planning huge Halloween celebrations he loved to share with his son, traveling when he could, spending as much time as he could get. Just before COVID hit, there was a vacation to Islamorada.

During COVID Connor made sure to attend classes remotely, telling his mom, "I can't go back to school, I can't get Dad sick.' Our home became our place," Agnes Tully said. "We tried to live the best life we could."

There was talk of going to Germany for one last experimental treatment in June, only to learn cancer had spread to the liver, Agnes said. "He was told he had two months to live," she said. "He died two months and 10 days later.

"I think about it all and think, 'I got him for 20 more years,'" Agnes Tully said, going back to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. "I didn't lose him that day. And if not for the PSA test, I might not have gotten the extra four years with him. Yeah, we had the shutdown due to COVID. But my son got to spend a year at home with his Dad."

Agnes Tully says her husband would have been moved by the outpouring of love.

"The tributes that have been posted," she said. "The things people have written about him. So many people loved him. It's incredible. He would've been proud."

 

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