Sources: CentralJersey.com; Asbury Park Press
Advanced Auto Parts stores in the central region of New Jersey are showing their support for the American Heart Association by raising funds for the non-profit throughout June.
“This is our second year as a company supporting the American Heart Association campaign. We are very pleased to participate,” said David Silverman, district manager for Central New Jersey and thje Jersey Shore at Advance Auto Parts. “It is just one of the charitable organizations and causes we support.”
Through the end of June, customers who go to any of the Advance Auto Parts or CarQuest stores can donate $1, $5 or $10 at the checkout for the American Heart Association.
“Our theme is ‘Life is Why We Give,’” Silverman said. “I really think that resonates around who we are as an organization and how committed we are to the American Heart Association, as well as other charitable organizations.”
In a ceremony in Jersey City across from the site of the 9/11 attacks, Gov. Phil Murphy paid tribute to North Jersey firefighters named after by signing two measures into law named after them, and noted the “stark contrast between how we treat our 9/11 heroes in New Jersey” and how Congress has responded.
One of them, Thomas P. Canzanella, was a Hackensack deputy fire chief who spent several weeks at Ground Zero after the attacks and pushed for stronger medical coverage for those who worked there. He died 12 years ago of cardiac arrest. The Thomas P. Canzanella Twenty First Century First Responders Protection Act extends state workers’ compensation protections to first responders so “they should never have to question whether they will be compensated accordingly for the sacrifices that they make,” said one of the sponsors, Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, D-Mercer.
His daughter Allison Canzanella, of Chicago, said simply, “I’m so proud to be his daughter every single day.”
The other bill Murphy signed was named the Bill Ricci World Trade Center Rescue, Recovery, and Cleanup Operations Act. It gives disability coverage to police and firefighters who were part of the rescue, recovery or cleanup at the World Trade Center site between Sept. 11 and Oct. 11, 2001.
Ricci, who recently retired from the Clifton Fire Department, had volunteered at ground zero and has lung disease connected to his work there. But he had been denied coverage because he was not on the clock. “I was shocked, angry,” he said. “That can’t be right, can it? Well, it no longer is.”
Luis Alvarez, a retired New York police detective who searched for survivors in the debris of the fallen World Trade Center towers and appeared with the comedian Jon Stewart to push federal lawmakers to reauthorize a fund to compensate victims and their families, has died of cancer.