For the first time, 9/11 deaths from disease are being honored; this WA man is one of them
Sep 11, 2026, 5:16 PM
(Photo courtesy of KIRO 7)
(Photo courtesy of KIRO 7)
In the 25 years since the 9/11 attacks, this year marks the first time that people who died from illnesses related to the Twin Towers collapsing were honored with a moment of silence. Washington State native Bill Engler is one of them, after passing away in May 2025 from two kinds of cancer and reactive airway disease.
“My dad was a first responder at heart. He’d always say it’s my job, it’s what I do, but it’s bigger than that,” Bill Engler’s son David Engler said. “I don’t speak for all first responders, obviously, but for him, I can speak for him and some of the people that I know. That job is not a job; it’s a right; it is what you have to do.”
In the weeks after 9/11, Bill was part of the Washington State Emergency response crew to go to New York City and help with the cleanup. Bill specifically gave medical assistance to the people digging in the pile of debris.
In 2021, KIRO7 spoke with Bill about what he saw and experienced. He recalled people lining the streets outside of Ground Zero with pictures of loved ones.
“They’d knock on the bus windows, and you’d look at them; they’d be handing you pictures, can you look for my brother, my husband, my mom, whoever it happened to be, can you please look for them? And we knew there was nobody alive. We weren’t going to find them,” Bill Engler said.
Engler took a Washington State Flag, raising it above the pile of debris while he was there.
“Raising that flag up and showing like, hey, we’re here, we are here to help, Washington State’s also here,” David Engler said.
Nearly 3,000 people died that day. 40,000 people responded to Ground Zero in the months after the tragedy, exposed to debris and dust that made many of them sick.
“He didn’t get fitted for a good mask until about four days in or so. But he had a mask on. He said it was dusty. It was scary. It was beyond what you can even possibly imagine,” David Engler said.
Bill Engler’s reactive airway disease gave him sleep apnea that he dealt with for years; he was first diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2011, and he wasn’t able to get a form of skin cancer removed before he died in 2025. All of it was linked to his time serving after 9/11.
“He would never change that,” David Engler said. “If you told him … [he’d say] ‘Great. I’ll still do it. I’ll walk into there any day of the week.
This week, New York City’s Mayor released documents showing what the city knew about the exposure and people’s risk to it. David Engler said his dad knew that was likely immediately after returning home, describing the air like he was breathing in sand.
“He was a lab rat. He knew it,” David Engler said. “He knew that they knew; they didn’t know what was going to happen. He told me right after he got back, ‘We’re going to get sick from this. There’s so much dust in the air, particularly that we’re inhaling.’”
Twenty-five years after the attacks, David Engler showed his sons the video of the second plane hitting the Tower, a video David watched live while getting ready for high school.
“You realize that when you show your 15-year-old videos of it, he wasn’t alive when it happened. You’re like, oh man, you have no idea what that day was like, how crazy it was,” he said.
A memory for him is a history lesson for his children, but David Engler hopes his father’s selfless response to tragedy draws them closer to the reality of it, or at the very least, inspires them to be like their grandfather.
“Grandpa is ‘Captain Safety,’ and he did all these great, amazing things,” he said. “And I think it’s a source of pride to say, ‘Hey, you know what? We were connected to a guy that’s willing to risk his life to help people.'”
