February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Officer Francis Hennessy from Longford died while rushing to the aid of his fellow New Yorkers in Brooklyn.
Up in the Bronx, detectives from Donegal and Mayo are leading the hunt for the killer of Clare native John Kelly, a man who had carried on another great tradition on New York soil, that of hurling and football at Gaelic Park.
Both the men who died were rearing families in their adopted hometown. And it is a particularly tragic twist to this combined Bronx and Brooklyn story that two wives are now without husbands, five kids without fathers.
With that in mind we are certain that yet another longstanding Irish tradition will now be followed, one that is no less the case in New York than in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, wherever the Irish have called home down the years.
And that is the tradition of a community rallying around its own in a time of tragedy and need.
The American dreams of Francis Hennessy and John Kelly ended far too soon. Their families, for now facing such overwhelming sadness, will, in time, live those same dreams.
But that will be later. For now they should be comforted and reminded that where life has been given, no life, even when it has been cut short, has been in vain.