Vincent Danz Remembered: U.S. Coast Guard Names Ship for 9/11 Hero

Has it really been nearly 25 years? Vincent Danz was a United States Marine, a U.S. Coast Guard Reservist and, on the day he died in the North Tower on 9/11, a member of the elite Emergency Service Unit 3 of the NYPD. Now, following a May 22 ceremony at the Intrepid Museum, there’s another Danz in public service: the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Vincent Danz.

The honor, which sees the fallen cop’s name on one of the fleet’s fastest ships, follows several other honors over the years including a street sign on his favorite beach on Dune Road in Southampton, “Vincent Danz 9-11-2001” and a Coast Guard station on Staten Island that was named in his honor two years ago.

He was posthumously awarded the New York City Police Department’s Medal of Honor. He was a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and joined the New York City Police Department in 1987 and served in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve as a Port Security Specialist 2nd Class.

The Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard, Vice Admiral Thomas Allan, presided over the ceremony on the Intrepid. “Vincent Danz’s legacy will live on not only through his family and his brothers and sisters in the NYPD, but through the Coast Guard crew who will breathe life into this cutter today,” said Allan.

“The Coast Guard Cutter Vincent Danz will perform the Coast Guard’s vital work across Oceania—projecting U.S. presence, countering illicit maritime activity, and strengthening our international partnerships.” It’s home port will be Guam.

As moving as such ceremonies are, it gives only a glimpse of the man.

He was among the first of the first responders who raced to the scene on 9-11 because he had rotated down from his normal unit in the Bronx to an ESU unit at 240 E. 20th St. between Second and Third Avenues, not far from my apartment in Stuyvesant Town.

He was married to Angela from Dublin, Ireland, who he met out in the Hamptons when she was working as an au pair. They had three young daughters Winifred, Emily, nine and six years old, respectively, and a baby Abigail less than a year old when they lost their dad. At a memorial service on Oct. 5, 2001, at St. Killian’s Church in Farmingdale, his widow recalled how he had been her tour guide to the splendors of the city. After 9/11, she went home to Ireland for awhile. And while Ireland was moved by 9/11, you could only really understand it if you lived through it. She came back to America and a few years later remarried and now goes by Angela Donohue.

She recalled how Vinny had called their home in Farmingdale on 9/11 at 9:50 a.m. as he was evacuating people from the North Tower. The South Tower had already collapsed. “I’m in the World Trade Center... There’s a lot of hurt people here. Say a prayer from them. And say a prayer for me.”

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I covered it for the New York Post at the time and recalled as I headed to the memorial on Oct. 5, 2001, a radio broadcaster from WCBS News Radio 88 doing a “rip and read” with my words from that day’s Post. “Daddy’s in heaven now,” Angela told her girls. And of course there was the heartbreaking photo in the next day’s Post of one of the daughters holding her father’s eight-point NYPD hat as she left the church, tears streaming down her face.

It was a testament to the man, that his first inclination that fateful day was to ask for a prayer for the people he was hoping to lead to safety. And then he added, almost as an after thought but maybe with a sense of the mounting danger, “And say a prayer for me.” Less than 40 minutes after his call, he was gone as the North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m.

As a youngster, his family always headed from their apartment in Jackson Heights to a bungalow in Southampton for the summer. Everything would be packed into the family station wagon and the moms with the kids would move out for the entire summer and the dads would come when they could, weekends or when they had a few days off on their shifts.

“Vinny was all about the beach,” one life long friend, Ray Dorrian, had told me at the time of the beach dedication, back in 2001. The dedication was achieved only after Southampton officials had initially resisted and my article had kicked up a storm about the snobs of Southampton who refused to honor one of their own. Eventually they caved and there was a beach party on a beautiful early October day in 2001.

When you say Southampton, most people think of glitz and glamour, the quiet rich, the palatial estates hidden behind high hedges. But that was not the Southampton of his youth.

They summered with other working class New Yorkers, the families of cops and firefighters and union workers at a place called Shinnecock Hills in Southhampton. The Danz family summer home was a bungalow with no heat in the early days until his dad eventually winterized it and moved the whole family, nine kids and Vinny’s mom and dad from “the city” to “the country.” The NYC transplant graduated from Southampton High School.

After the Marines he joined the NYPD, first in Transit and then in ESU. His three daughters, Winnifred, Emily and Abigail, are now proud graduates of Fordham University and one has a child of her own, the first grandchild of Angela and Vinny.

Felix Danz, the next closest sibling to Vinny in the close knit Danz family was also a Coast Guard veteran himself and was there for the commissioning. He said even after all these years, he still misses his youngest brother, the “baby” of the Danz family.

“It’s historic,” he said of the honor on May 22. “I’d rather have my brother back but it was very emotional seeing his name on the side of a boat.”

He said his brother “would be tickled to see his name if he was alive today. He’d be on the beach, sipping a Corona and watching it go by... He was not militaristic, but he was proud of what the service represented and respected everyone who wore the uniform.”

Vinny Danz may be gone, but his spirit lives on. And now a cutter ship bearing his name will patrol the seas of the western Pacific, a fleet testament to his legacy as a true New York hero.