Kathy N. Mazza (delosh) Obituary

Kathy N. Mazza (delosh) attended Plainedge High School in North Massapequa, NY. View the obituary, post a memory, or share a photo about Kathy N. Mazza (delosh).

Graduation Year	Class of 1973
Date of Passing	Sep 11, 2001
About	Police Captain Kathy Mazza Assignment on September 11, 2001: Port Authority Police Academy HQ, Jersey City, NJ Kathy Mazza From Police Heroes, a book by author Chuck Whitlock: Captain Kathy Mazza, forty-six, was the first female commanding officer of the Port Authority Police Academy. On September 11, she joined her colleagues at the scene. When there was a bottleneck of people at the revolving doors in the North Tower, she shot out the floor-to-ceiling glass walls on the mezzanine. Her action allowed hundreds of people to escape. She was last seen with Lieutenant Robert Cirri as they were helping carry a woman down the stairs when the building collapsed. Captain Mazza grew up in Massapequa, New York, with three brothers. After she graduated from Nassau Community College, she was an operating room nurse at two New York hospitals, the Long Island Jewish Hospital in Queens and St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, New York. In 1987, after ten years of working as a cardiothoracic nurse in the operating room, she enrolled in the Port Authority Police Academy. She patrolled JFK Airport for a year, worked in the central police pool for one year, then returned to JFK Airport for the next six years. She was promoted to sergeant in 1994 and was assigned to the Police Academy for three years and was promoted to lieutenant in December 1998 while at the academy. Her next assignment was the Staten Island Bridges/New Jersey Marine Terminals command. In April 2000 she became one of only two female captains in the Port Authority, which at the time had fourteen male captains. In 1992, she had open-heart surgery to correct a quarter-size hole. A year later, she saved her mother’s life by recognizing what her mother’s chest pains meant – that her arteries were blocked. During her career with the Port Authority, she supervised the agency’s first-aid programs and certified first responder and EMT training. She also taught emergency medical service programs at the Port Authority Police Academy. In 1999 the Regional Emergency Medical Services Council of New York City named Captain Mazza its Basic Life Support Provider of the Year based on her work on the use of portable heart defibrillators. The training program she initiated in 1997 for six hundred officers to use defibrillators in airports has saved at least thirteen lives. Captain Mazza was married to Christopher Delosh for sixteen years. He is a police officer of the New York Police Department working at the 25th Precinct in Harlem. At a memorial service for emergency service workers, Mayor Guiliani said of Mazza, as reported by the New York Post: “She was a trailblazer with a career that was truly unique. She had an incredible desire to help people.

Classmate Memories

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Bob Read '75 said:

Memories ! ! ! !

I remember Kathy from the high school days, though we both went to Plainedge High School, she was 2 years older than me and our paths did not cross at that time. Not until, both of us, working at the local Bagel Bakery in Seafood, did we meet. I was a senior in high school and she was already in college at the time.
We quickly became workplace friends then "just" friends as the expression goes, as well as also socializing in our larger group.

Way back then you could identify, in Kathy, that she was a straightforward, no BS type, self-driven and even at that young age, she did display leadership abilities.

Even though her College nursing studies and working in The Bagel Bakery consumed much of her time, she was able to make time to enjoy life. She could be a character and she did know how to enjoy life and have fun. Kathy was probably one of the most well-rounded persons you could ever ever meet. And everybody liked her. she was an easy person to like.
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Even though she only lived a couple blocks from me as a kid, as time went by the usual big groups you hung out in dwindled away. People's lives got complicated with family and careers, I lost touch with Kathy. That was back in the late seventies.

In 2001, I heard that Kathy was a victim of that horrible fateful day of the 9/11 attack. With anger and hate still in my heart and soul over the attack, I was, of course, additionally saddened to hear about Kathy. I was then motivated to look through old photo albums with my, then wife at that time, and came across some pictures of Kathy which brought back many fond memories.

Those memories.............quickly overshadowed by such a tragedy.

While I was well aware of her coming a nurse, I was not up to dated of things from that time on, and I really knew little of her life beyond that ..of the Port Authority, of her career accomplishments. When I read about them I can honestly say , I was not a surprised. I always remembered Kathy as being one of the sharpest tools in the shed and that she had the ability to think outside the box. Which, as we can all read about in the obituary, she continuously displayed throughout her career AND up until the last day of her life.

In my own selfish way, I am saddened to not have kept in touch with her.

Kathy is the reason cliches are created.
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"We were all better for knowing her"

"The world will miss her"

Bob Read Class of '75

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