STATEN ISLAND: Remembering his kid brother

John Curatolo, 46, didn't want to attend the memorial. He preferred to sit alone in a lawn chair a block away from the site, to quietly thumb through the scrapbook his wife made of his kid brother, Robert, a firefighter who died when the second tower collapsed.

Curatolo, a member of the FDNY, spent two days at Ground Zero, digging for his brother.

"As soon as I came down, I knew," he said. "It was indescribable."

Finally, an emergency worker told John he was 95 percent sure they found Robert, unless someone else was wearing his fireman's jacket.

"He was one of the first found," John said. "Thank God, because my mother couldn't handle it if he wasn't."

Robert, 31 when he died, had married just 28 days earlier at Walt Disney World. Dozens of family members descended on Florida for the wedding; they stayed in Orlando for three weeks. "He was so happy that we were there," John said. "We got to spend a lot of time together." Robert, the youngest of eight siblings, planned to start a family when he returned home to Staten Island. His brother remembers his warmth and humor, how whenever he entered a party he would say, "Hello, my fans!" John said he would spend the remainder of the day the same way he has every anniversary since the attacks. He'll attend Mass at St. Bart's Church, have lunch with fellow firefighters and then host an open house.