Robert Kilduff Boston Fire died Saturday night after falling from a third-story window while fighting a three-alarm house fire at 18 Treadway Road in Dorchester. He was taken to Boston Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
The 53-year-old Rescue Company 2 firefighter was a 24-year veteran, a West Roxbury resident, a father of two and a third-generation firefighter. Boston Fire Commissioner Rodney Marshall called him a “firefighter’s firefighter.”
18 Treadway Road
The fire broke out around 8 p.m. with five residents inside the home. By about 8:15 p.m., the incident had become a three-alarm fire, and by 8:32 p.m. heavy fire had been knocked down as firefighters used an aggressive interior and exterior attack to contain it.
The blaze spread to all three floors and burned through the roof. Firefighters used multiple ground and aerial ladders to keep it from spreading to adjacent homes, and Michelle Wu said every resident came out “safe and sound” because of the work of Kilduff and the other firefighters on scene.
Rodney Marshall
Marshall said the death would stay with the department “for a long time” and warned, “There’s no routine fire, there’s no routine call. And you’re never truly safe until you get home.” He also said, “We wake up every day, put on our pants, we come here to do this job selflessly” and “We hope to go home every day. But sometimes that doesn’t happen.”
Marshall said Kilduff had rescued someone earlier Saturday during a train incident. More than a month earlier, he helped save a fellow firefighter who suffered cardiac arrest at a fire, accompanied that firefighter to the hospital and performed CPR.
Boston Medical Center
Sam Dillon said the union “gained a hero” and called Kilduff “our friend, our brother, and a dedicated family man.” Dillon also said, “Local 718 lost one of our best. The city of Boston lost one of its most courageous and dedicated.”
Early Sunday, Kilduff’s body was loaded into an ambulance and taken to the chief medical examiner’s office. Boston identified him as the first firefighter in the department to die in the line of duty in more than a decade.
