DEBORAH HASTINGS
Associated Press National Writer
NEW YORK (AP) -- Finally, he was able to carry out his son.
He'd waited exactly three months, in honor of an unwritten code that endures even in these upside-down times. Be they sons or fathers or colleagues from the ``house,'' firefighters carry out their own dead.
But until Wednesday, Lee Ielpi, a retired firefighter who gave 26 years to the Fire Department of New York, could only wait.
His 29-year-old son, Jonathan, was buried at the World Trade Center. Ielpi looked for him every day, digging with dozens of others at the 16-acre graveyard. On Tuesday, not long before midnight, just after he'd gotten home and poured himself a drink, the phone rang.
They had found Jonathan's body in what used to be the subterranean shopping mall beneath the twin towers. And that made Lee Ielpi feel good, something he's not felt in a very long time. And so he and Brendan, the only son he has left, went to the site to meet Jonathan's colleagues from Engine 288 in Queens, to claim Jonathan's body early Wednesday morning.
Even before Sept. 11, when 343 firemen vanished inside or underneath the collapsing skyscrapers, it was a time-honored practice: When a firefighter perishes in the line of duty, the body stays where it is until someone who knows him or her can come and quite literally -- and carefully -- pick it up.
Often, colleagues come. Often, given the history of New York families begetting generations of firefighters, relatives come.
After three months, the radio calls at ground zero don't come as frequently. When one does go out, riding the static of rescue workers' walkie-talkies, it can be a relief.
``It feels like a tremendous weight has been taken off my shoulders,'' Ielpi said Wednesday. ``They found my son.'' And then, with extreme politeness, he got off the phone before the tears came.
A few days earlier, he had explained what kind of work faced recovery workers at the trade center. ``You pick the person up, or a piece of a person, as best you can,'' said Ielpi, struggling to be accurate and to respectfully edit gory details.
``We handle that person like that person is alive. That person deserves all the dignity we can give them.''
He wanted to make an important point. Firefighters deeply care about their own _ but they also care about every other lost soul trapped in the rubbled hell. ``We are looking for everyone. We treat everyone with respect,'' he said.
Cops have different customs when it comes to claiming the bodies of their dead. ``If we're out on the street and one of us gets shot or killed, we're taking them out of there,'' said New York Police Department spokesman Detective Eugene Canapi. ``It's just the difference in our jobs.''
Nonetheless, do officers claim the bodies of cops killed at the trade center?
A loud sigh comes from Canapi. He answers as though the words are stabbing him on the way out.
``We haven't been finding too many of our own people lately,'' he says slowly.
Of 23 NYPD officers buried in the towers, only 7 have been confirmed dead through identification of remains. Of 343 lost FDNY members, the number is 112.
And such is the state of things that finding bodies and fragments of bodies brings a kind of joy to those left behind and to those picking through mountains of death and destruction with gloved hands and equipment the size of garden tools.
When a firefighter's body, the first in about two weeks, was found on Dec. 5, Ielpi's reaction was: ``It's a great, great day.''
Ielpi has a big heart. Tears come without much warning, and he has learned to let them come.
On a night in late November, his overburdened heart fell in on itself. Across the trade center debris, someone yelled his name. ``Lee, we found someone.''
He forced himself to walk to a hole dug by rescuers. He could see the body trapped below. He saw the firefighter ``turnout'' coat with yellow stripes.
Ielpi took a hard breath and looked at the faces of his buddies. Five pairs of eyes stared back. No one spoke.
The father of Jonathan Ielpi felt ill. ``I didn't want to go down there if the name on the back of the turnout coat was Ielpi. I don't want to see it, you know?''
But that was not the name.
The coat said Sweeney. It belonged to Brian Sweeney, his son's best friend since school days. The 29-year-old man had reported to his friend's firehouse in Queens on Sept. 11 so they could work together for the day. They were like that. Young men who still played like boys, even on their day off, who thought running around on fire trucks and rescuing people was a very cool job.
Both rolled when the trade center call came in. Both died.
And so Jonathan's dad stepped into the hole and helped carry out Brian Sweeney, just as, on Wednesday, he'd help carry out Jonathan.
``That's what we do,'' Ielpi said. ``We carry out our own.''
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