Boston firefighter Robert T. Kilduff Jr. died Saturday night after falling from a third-story window while fighting a three-alarm house fire in Dorchester, a loss that stunned a department now mourning its first line-of-duty death in more than a decade. He was 53 years old.
The fire broke out around 8 p.m. at 18 Treadway Road with five residents inside, and it spread quickly through all three floors before burning through the roof. Firefighters had the blaze knocked down by 8:32 p.m., after using multiple ground and aerial ladders and an aggressive interior and exterior attack to keep it from spreading to nearby homes.
Boston Fire Commissioner Rodney Marshall said Kilduff suffered severe injuries and was rushed by Boston paramedics and EMTs to Boston Medical Center, where he was later pronounced dead. Around 8:50 p.m., a mayday was declared after he fell from the third floor. Kilduff was assigned to Rescue Company 2 and had been with the department for 24 years.
Marshall called him a firefighter’s firefighter and said his death would stay with the department for a long time. He also said there is no routine fire and no routine call, adding that firefighters are never truly safe until they get home. The warning landed hard because Kilduff had already spent part of Saturday doing exactly what the department asks of its members: earlier in the day, he rescued someone during an incident involving a train, Marshall said.
The loss is also being felt as a family rupture. Kilduff was a third-generation firefighter, a U.S. Marine veteran and the father of two. His father served as a Boston fire lieutenant and died in 2008, tying his life even more tightly to the department’s history. City and union leaders said he had already spent his career in service, and that service ended in the same kind of call Boston firefighters answer every day.
Union president Sam Dillon said the department had gained a hero and lost one of its best, calling Kilduff a friend, a brother and a dedicated family man. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said he came from a family of firefighters and held the job as the highest duty to serve and protect, adding that because of his actions, every resident in the home came out safe and sound. The fire department said the fatality was the first Boston firefighter death in the line of duty in more than a decade, a measure of how rare and jarring the loss is for the city.
What happens next is now fixed around the unanswered questions that follow every firefighter death: how Kilduff’s fall unfolded, what the department’s review finds, and how Boston honors a man who died after helping save others twice in one day.
