Senior Court Officer Thomas Jurgens

About Thomas Edward Jurgens This profile was originally published in 2001/2002 After the second plane hit the World Trade Center, Mitchel Wallace called his fiancee. The sound of the sirens in the background was deafening. Over the din, he shouted that there had been a terrible accident. She screamed at him that it was no accident, that it was a terrorist attack and urged him to get out of there. “He said, ‘I can’t! I can’t! There’s bodies everywhere! I gotta help!'” his fiancee, Noreen McDonough, said. Yesterday, Wallace and two other court officers, Capt. William Harry Thompson and senior court officer Thomas Jurgens – men who did not have to be there – were missing. When the first plane hit, they and their fellow officers raced to the scene to help. Wallace wasn’t even in uniform yet. “He just responded as an officer with heart. He saw a problem and ran to it,” said Sgt. Patricia Maiorino, a co-worker. As panicked people poured out of the building to escape, several court officers ran upstairs to evacuate remaining workers. Jurgens and Maiorino pulled people out of the building to safety. Nobody thought the building was going to fall, Maiorino said, so Jurgens and Wallace ran into the basement to see if anyone needed help. Moments later, she said, they got a report that another plane was headed for the towers. “We’re yelling into the radio, ‘Everybody get out! Everybody get out!'” Then, she said, “we hear a rumble, and the building starts to fall.” Unsure of what was happening, she, Thompson and others ran inside. The south tower collapsed. The force was so great, it hurled them into the north tower. They broke holes through walls and climbed out from the rubble. Frantically, they searched for survivors. For a week they have heard nothing of their fellow officers. They are still searching, still hoping, she said. At their homes in the Bronx, the Meadowmere section of Lawrence, and Mineola, the officers’ families and friends have kept vigil, desperately hoping the men would be found. They wanted no mention of the past tense, no mention of victims. “We still have hope here,” said Michele Miller, Wallace’s sister. Heroic acts are nothing new to Wallace. In fact, New York State Chief Judge Judith Kaye honored him in May for saving a man’s life. A year ago, Wallace, 34, was riding the Long Island Rail Road when passenger Mark Ingberman of Plainview went into cardiac arrest. While other passengers stared in shock, Wallace raced to his side and performed CPR for 15 minutes until paramedics boarded the train, according to court records. “Mitchel Wallace saved my dad’s life, and if it weren’t for him, my dad wouldn’t be here now,” Ingberman’s daughter, Allison, said in a letter nominating him for the award. Wallace even followed Ingberman to Winthrop-University Hospital to make sure he was all right and to tell his family what happened. That wasn’t unusual for him, said Wallace’s mother, Rita, of Bayside. “He took the cases almost too much to heart,” she said. Jurgens’ wife, Joan, knows there is no way she could have talked her husband out of going to help. Even if she had begged and pleaded, he would have been resolute about what he had to do. “It’s just his nature and his way,” she said. Jurgens, 26, and his wife are newlyweds. They were married June 1. Their favorite activity, she said, was simply spending time together. “Any kind of crisis, he would always be the first one to respond,” Joan Jurgens said. He was trained as an emergency medical technician and a volunteer firefighter, and his family used to tease him about which uniform he was going to put on that day, said his mother, Linda Jurgens. Helping people has just been a way of life for him, she said. Thompson, 51, has been the sole support for his widowed mother, Maiorino said. An instructor at the academy for new court officers, he is respected for his professionalism and dedication. As a captain, he was in charge of protecting judges, she said. “This was a top-of-the-line guy. There’s nobody better than him.” But the families remain hopeful. “Nobody I know working there has given up hope,” said Joan Jurgens. — Sandra Peddie