09/10/2026
The FDNY called him "MacGyver." He could fix anything, build anything — and on September 11, 2001, he ran toward the one thing he couldn't fix.
Timothy Welty grew up in Flushing, Queens, the kind of kid who took things apart just to understand them.
At 15, he found a junk car, put it up on jacks, and rebuilt the brakes himself. His father, a college professor, didn't believe him at first.
"What the hell are you doing?" he asked. "Fixing the brakes," Tim said. "I took them apart. I remember how it goes."
That instinct followed him everywhere. He could do push-ups balanced on two fingers. He skied, skydived, raced motorcycles, played hockey and volleyball for the department.
He joined the FDNY in 1993. By 1998, he'd landed at Squad 288 in Maspeth, Queens, where firefighters started calling him "MacGyver." He'd started his own construction company on the side, and had just finished renovating his mother's house — new skylights, new molding, hand-laid parquet floors.
"It was not only the skill of his carpentry but his artistic vision," his mother said later, "that makes the house so special now."
He lived in Yonkers with his wife, Delia, and their two young children.
On the morning of September 11, Welty had just come off a shift when the first plane hit the towers. He saw it from the firehouse.
The call went out for Hazmat 1. He phoned Delia to say he wouldn't make it home in time to walk their son to school.
Then he grabbed his gear and jumped on the truck.
He was 34.
He never got to see his daughter grow past infancy, or watch his son start kindergarten. A street in his old Queens neighborhood carries his name now, a few blocks from where he grew up fixing things nobody thought he could fix.
Some things, it turns out, no one can rebuild.
