A veteran Boston firefighter was killed Saturday night while battling a three-alarm house fire in Dorchester, after falling from a third-story window at 18 Treadway Road. Robert Kilduff Jr. suffered severe injuries and was pronounced dead at Boston Medical Center.
Kilduff, 53, was a 24-year veteran of the Boston Fire Department assigned to Rescue Company 2. Five residents were inside the home when the fire broke out around 8 p.m., and by 8:15 p.m. it had been reported as a three-alarm fire. Firefighters said the blaze spread through all three floors and burned through the roof before crews used multiple ground and aerial ladders to keep it from extending to adjacent homes.
By 8:32 p.m., heavy fire had been knocked down and crews were working an aggressive interior and exterior attack to contain the damage. Kilduff’s death was the first line-of-duty loss for a Boston firefighter in more than a decade, a blow that landed hard on a department that knew him as much for what he did before the fatal fire as for how he died in it.
Earlier on Saturday, Kilduff had rescued someone during an incident involving a train. Over a month before the Dorchester fire, he helped save a fellow firefighter who suffered cardiac arrest while battling a blaze, performed CPR and accompanied that firefighter to the hospital. Those episodes added to the portrait of a man colleagues described as a firefighter’s firefighter.
Rodney Marshall said the loss would stay with the department for a long time. He said there is no routine fire, no routine call, and that firefighters are never truly safe until they get home. Sam Dillon said the union had gained a hero, and that Kilduff was a friend, a brother and a dedicated family man. Dillon said Local 718 lost one of its best, and the city lost one of its most courageous and dedicated firefighters.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said Kilduff came from a family of firefighters and treated the work as the highest duty to serve and protect. She said that because of his actions that night, working alongside fellow firefighters, every resident made it out safely. Kilduff was a U.S. Marine veteran, a father of two, and a third-generation firefighter who lived in West Roxbury.
The fire also carried a larger weight for Boston because Kilduff was the son of a Boston fire lieutenant who died in 2008, tying his death to a family already marked by loss. What remains now is the kind of reckoning that follows a line-of-duty death: how a firefighter known for saving others became the latest name added to the department’s worst ledger.
