Despite 9/11- caused stage 4 renal cancer that metastasized to his lungs, Edward Cetnar has been the head of the Port Authority Police (as Superintendent) since 2018. In fact, he was given the diagnosis 2 years earlier, at the FIRST symptom: pain in his side. That is the nature of 9/11cancers. They are often cancers on steroids.
On September 11th, Cetnar was the acting Sergeant of the highly elite “teams unit” of the New Jersey State Police. The 30 members comprised a SWAT team...the Navy Seals of the New Jersey State Police. They were the snipers, the divers, the heavy rescue people. Activated in Princeton, New Jersey by the Governor some 2 hours after the terror attack on The World Trade Center, Cetnar and his team were immediately sent into the voids of Ground Zero, looking for any sign of survivors. They found none. It turned into a somber recovery.
Ed says all he thought of was the mission. It wasn’t until weeks later that it caught up to him. He thought of all those offices in The World Trade Center. All the office equipment. But he failed to see a single desk at Ground Zero, not a single phone, not a single chair. Papers flew everywhere. But everything else was pulverized, including most of the close to 3,000 who were murdered. The 343 NYC firefighters, the 23 New York City Police officers, and the 37 Port Authority cops, the most police department members ever lost in a single day in the U.S. The department Edward Cetnar would head 17 years later, was headquartered in The World Trade Center in 2001.