By Carolyn Stein, Andrew Carter, Nell Salzman
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — The emergency call came in at 4:03 Wednesday morning, with a report of a fire in the 1200 block of North Pine Avenue in the Austin neighborhood on the West side. The blaze was less than 2 miles north of the Chicago Fire Department station known as Engine 96/Truck 29 — the station where David Meyer had worked his way up to captain, where he was in his 29th year as a Chicago firefighter.
He and his colleagues rushed into the truck and to the scene. The fire had spread to the garage at 5505 W. Crystal St. Fifteen minutes after the call came in, though, they had the fire extinguished. It had to seem, for a brief moment, like a routine early-morning call, and the responders “were outside the garage,” Commissioner Annette Nance-Holt said later, “starting salvage and overhaul.”
That’s when the garage collapsed. Meyer, working in the midst of it all, suffered injuries that prompted what Nance-Holt described as a “mayday alarm.” He was transported to Stroger Hospital and by 11:21 a.m., some of his fellow firefighters could be seen with tears in their eyes as they walked out of the hospital, mourning the death of one of their own.
Meyer, who joined the department in October 1996, was 54. He left behind a wife, three daughters, a son, his parents and “of course,” Nance-Holt said Wednesday morning during a brief but emotional news conference, “his big family — the Chicago Fire Department .”
“Please keep us all in your prayers,” she said. “This is unfortunate. It’s one of those things we go to work every day and, you know, we never know if we’re going to come home.”
It was still too early to know the details, she said. Too early to know how the fire spread and moved to the garage, and how everything happened so quickly, in a terrible rush. Late Wednesday afternoon, though, the department’s Office of Fire Investigation, working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, determined the fire was started “by human action,” in a trash can near the garage.
Chicago police on Wednesday evening confirmed that a person of interest was in custody.
One moment the firefighters had everything under control. The next came the mayday call, and the frantic race to the hospital.
Near the corner of Crystal and Pine on Wednesday afternoon, Elio Alonso Jr . recalled the horror of awaking to the threat of a fire that he said originated in a trash can in their alley and then spread to their garage. At first there was a knock on a window from police, he said, and then the barking from the family’s dog, named Gigi.
The family rushed out of their house and watched while their garage disappeared into the flames. Those flames “were huge,” Alonso said, adding they’d consumed and damaged a 1965 Cadillac and a motorbike. And soon enough the garage itself collapsed, leading to the scramble to try to save Meyer’s life.
Nance-Holt, who joined the department in 1990, received the awful phone call in the early-morning hours. When she heard the caller relay Meyer’s name she immediately made a decades-old connection.
“Oh, my God,” she said she thought when hearing Meyer’s name. “I know him.”
“I was a deputy on the West Side,” she said. “And I worked with Dave.”
Meyer spent almost all of his nearly 30 years as a Chicago firefighter on the West Side. Before becoming captain of Truck 29, he was a lieutenant on Truck 35. Nance-Holt and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson spent Wednesday morning meeting with and consoling members of Meyer’s family, those related by blood or badge.
They learned things about him and told stories and tried to console each other amid the grief. Nance-Holt said Meyer’s wife shared that she and her husband had been a couple for nearly 40 years, since they were teenagers. The commissioner spent time with Meyer’s mother, who said, according to Nance-Holt, “No one should watch their child go first.”
She knew as well as anyone, though, what Meyer knew and what all firefighters know. And that was the grim reality that the next call could always be their last — that in their chosen line of work they were never guaranteed another call or another day. Nance-Holt spoke of the bond among firefighters. The time spent in the station, watching each other age, watching their children grow up. Being in each other’s weddings. Becoming godparents and even grandparents. Going to funerals.
She’d come to know Wednesday morning that Meyer “was the rock” of his family. That he was a talented builder, and good with his hands.
Johnson called Meyer’s death “a very difficult time for our city,” and underscored his sacrifice.
“Our city is strong,” the mayor said. “The brave women and men who serve this city every single day and put their lives on the line for us — we do not take that for granted.”
Meyer became the first Chicago firefighter to die in the line of duty since 2023, when the department mourned the death of four firefighters. That was part of why, the commissioner said, she was hesitant to discuss the cause and the details in the immediate aftermath — because after a calendar year without any deaths, Wednesday came as a sad and painful shock.
There was a thought, she said of the pain of the past, “that we’d escaped that.”
“And now here we are again. … So just give us a moment to grieve, to wrap our minds around it. To take our brother to the morgue, where we go next with his family.”
By the middle of Wednesday afternoon, the site of the fire had already been cleared. There was nothing left of the garage, and few signs that such a calamity had happened. Meyer’s station, meanwhile, remained quiet. American and Chicago flags rustled slightly in the wind. Neighbors gathered occasionally and the red garage doors opened and closed.
Officers shuffled around inside. Around 4:30 p.m., a little more than 12 hours before a tragedy unfolded, another call came in. A truck pulled out of the station with its lights flashing and sirens blaring, on to the next emergency.
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