Chris Bilger was killed on the way to a false alarm call in 1987

By Sarah Hall

Editor

It’s been 31 years since Christopher Bilger died, but he’s still very much a part of day-to-day life in the North Syracuse Fire Department.

“He’s part of the history here, part of our ancestry,” said NSFD Deputy Chief Casey Daugard.

Bilger, the only firefighter the NSFD has lost in the line of duty, was killed in a car accident on the way to a reported fire on Sept. 20, 1987. He had just graduated from Cicero-North Syracuse High School when he joined the department a year and a half earlier.

“He was a teenage kid, full of life, full of energy and wanting to do all kinds of things,” said Daugard, who joined the department shortly after Bilger. “He would’ve been successful here. He still had a lot to do.”

Daugard recalled Bilger as someone who would “do anything for anybody.”

“He was very giving, especially for a teenager,” Daugard said. “Instead of going out drinking all the time and stuff, he was learning new things in the fire department. It was a different lifestyle.”

Daugard followed his friend into the department.

“He was the reason I joined,” Daugard said. “We grew up together. He got me interested in the fire service.”

It was early on the morning of Sept. 20, 1987, when the Onondaga County 911 Center received a call reporting a fire at the Parklane Apartments at 208 N. Main St., North Syracuse. The caller indicated that people were trapped inside. Members were responding to the NSFD station when the chief received a call about a potentially serious car accident on the 200 block of Church Street. The department split its response. Those who came upon the accident discovered that the driver of a two-door Chrysler Cordoba had skidded on the rain-slicked roads into a tree, splitting the car in two, and been ejected from the vehicle and suffering serious injuries.

The driver was Chris Bilger. He was 20 years old. He died 13 hours later.

In addition to his brothers and sisters in the department, Bilger left behind four brothers and a sister, as well as his mother and stepfather — also a North Syracuse firefighter who responded to the crash scene — and his father, his maternal grandparents, his paternal grandmother and his paternal step-grandparents.

But the saddest part is that it didn’t have to happen: The call turned out to be a false alarm.

“Somebody was at a different location calling and reporting a fire at a different location to pick on their ex-boyfriend or whatever else,” Daugard said. “It was a malicious false alarm.”

The woman who made the call was ultimately caught and charged with two counts of falsely reporting an incident, a misdemeanor. She plead guilty to one count and was sentenced to shock probation, which included a jail sentence of less than one year.

For Bilger’s loved ones, it wasn’t enough.

“One of the biggest things was that there were no laws to really punish the person that made the call,” Daugard said. “They couldn’t tie her to his death [and charge her with] manslaughter or anything like that.”

The family and the department worked with then-Assemblyman Michael Bragman to create the Bilger Bill, which made it a felony to falsely report an incident if it caused the death of or harm to an emergency responder, carrying a penalty of up to four years in prison. The bill was signed by Gov. Mario Cuomo in November of 1990.

In the years since, the department has undertaken a number of efforts to memorialize Bilger. His name has been added to the Onondaga County Emergency Services monument in Syracuse, the New York State Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Albany and the International Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Maryland. There are also plaques dedicated to Bilger in both NSFD stations. Each year, the department names a member as the Chris Bilger Firefighter of the Year — Daugard was the first honoree — and it gives out a scholarship in his memory to the child of a firefighter through North Syracuse Dollars for Scholars. And when sections of Thompson Road were renamed as General Irwin Boulevard and renumbered in the mid-2000s, the department dedicated Station No. 2 as 70 General Irwin Blvd. in memory of Bilger’s fire department ID number.

But NSFD members believe it takes more than a check or letters engraved in stone to keep a memory alive. Each year, on the drill date closest to the anniversary of his death, the department holds a service at Bilger’s graveside to honor the late firefighter.

“We just say a prayer and have a moment of silence,” Daugard said. “There’s little things we can get in here and there.”

Daugard said he hopes firefighters remember Bilger on their way to scenes and drive carefully — and citizens think about him before making false reports.

“You’ve got to be careful coming to calls and stuff like that so that it doesn’t happen to somebody else is really the most important things, and to let people know the importance of making the false calls so that they don’t do that as well to prevent it from happening to a police officer, ambulance, or fire, anybody,” he said. “It’s needless. There aren’t many of us, and we really need to protect as many as we can.”