Anthony Jimenez, Nassau public servant and Vietnam veteran, dies at 74

Whether seating jurors or saving lives — sometimes both at once — Glen Cove’s Anthony "Tony" Jimenez was a public servant’s public servant, the one to whom the rest looked to see how it’s done.

"He was always there, whenever I needed him and whenever so many people needed him," said Nassau County Legislature Minority Leader Delia DeRiggi-Whitton (D-Glen Cove).

"When we were running together for [Glen Cove] City Council back in ’07 and going door-to-door," she recalled, "a group of us knocked on a door and the woman who answered was older and seemed a little disheveled. And later after we left, he went back to the house and made sure she had food and things like that. That was the kind of person he was. I have a hundred examples like that."

Jimenez spent decades as a volunteer EMT, including as chief of Glen Cove Emergency Medical Services; as a court officer for the state Supreme Court in Mineola; as a Glen Cove city councilmember and the director of that city’s Veterans Affairs Office; and as a Nassau County assistant commissioner of jurors.

However, family came first, said his daughter, Nina Jimenez. During her teenage years, she recalled, "he had his EMS scanner and he would call me and be, like, ‘I hope you're not on Dosoris Lane, Nina,’ because the cops were heading to that [boisterous teen] party. So I would look at all my friends and say, ‘We have to go now! We have to go right now,’ " she said, chuckling at the memory.

Anthony Jimenez died April 19 of congestive heart failure at the Long Island State Veterans Home in Stony Brook. Long been plagued by health issues that family and friends suspect were because of exposure to toxic air as a 9/11 first responder and to the herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam and Cambodia, where he saw combat as a U.S. Army sergeant with the 1st Calvary Infantry. He was 74 and had been hospitalized for roughly two years, his family said.

'A true hero'

"Glen Cove has lost a true hero, and I lost a dear friend," Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove), a former Glen Cove Mayor, wrote in a social-media tribute. "Tony was a man of quiet strength who always put others before himself. His legacy of service will live on in the community he loved."

Anthony Pasquale Jimenez was born July 12, 1951, in Manhattan, the middle child of World War II U.S. Navy veteran Philip Anthony Jimenez and seamstress and office manager Micheline Borrillo Jimenez. The family moved to Levittown when Anthony was 12.

After enlisting at 17 and shipping off to Vietnam at 18 after graduation from W.T. Clarke High School in Westbury, Jimenez served as a de facto medic when circumstances required. "So not only was he the sergeant in the field but he also took care of some of the soldiers that were wounded," said his wife, retired nurse Katherine Grace Pufahl Jimenez, whom he married in 1984. "And that really spurred his love for medical things."

Returning from the war in 1971, having been awarded a Purple Heart, a National Service Defense Medal and the New York State Conspicuous Service Cross, Jimenez earned a surgical technology degree from Nassau Community College in Garden City. He went on to work at Glen Cove Hospital, where he was among the operating room staff tending to the victims of the Avianca Flight 052 crash in Cove Neck on Jan. 25, 1990.

Shift to judicial system

He became a Glen Cove volunteer EMT in the mid-1990s, and before the decade was out had become chief of the city’s EMS. Professionally, he shifted his focus to the judicial system, where as a court officer he was among those advocating to have heart defibrillators installed in courtrooms. In 1998, he was among the officers at Mineola’s State Supreme Court who rushed to use that device to revive a prospective juror in cardiac arrest. 

Jimenez — whose public service included volunteering with such civic groups and charitable organizations as the Kiwanis, the Glen Cove Sage Foundation, the substance-abuse group SAFE, the Glen Cove Boys & Girls Club, and the North Shore Sheltering Program — faced multiple health issues, including diabetes and kidney failure. In 2020, after a year on dialysis, he received a kidney from his niece, Julie Jimenez, for a successful transplant.

"He was in the hospital so often, and he never once gave up," said DeRiggi-Whitton. "It was always 'Yeah, this'll be OK. Yeah, they're going to get this.’ So this is a really strong human being, not only in caring for others but for fighting for his own life."

In addition to his wife and daughter of Glen Cove, Jimenez is survived by son Christopher, of Modesto, California; brother Philip Jr., of Freeport; sister, Michelle Dieli of Florida; and a grandson.

Visitation was Wednesday and Thursday at Whitting Funeral Home, in Glen Head. Following a Mass on Friday at St. John's of Lattingtown Episcopal Church, in Locust Valley, he was buried at Locust Valley Cemetery.

Donations may be made to the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation, NOSH Delivers, Paws of War, the Sage Foundation, SAFE Glen Cove Coalition, the Glen Cove Youth Bureau or the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.