Actor Denis Leary details chilling 9/11 experience that helped lead to TV hit Rescue Me

Actor Denis Leary was unloading his hockey gear at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers for a morning game when United Flt.175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center 25 years ago. “They turned the rink into a morgue, and they lined up all the ambulances,” Leary, 69, told The Post. The heartbreaking scene was the beginning of a journey that led to Leary’s famous TV series “Rescue Me” – a defiantly politically incorrect dramedy around FDNY members ridden with Sept.

11 survivor’s guilt.The New Englander star and his pick-up-hockey teammates from his production company had a clear, firsthand view of the terrorism and destruction unfurling that day from the West Side Highway.Leary described seeing the “endless flow” of dust and cut-covered corporate workers fleeing uptown for hours.“The sound of the buildings … it’s almost like it goes into your bones,” he said. He was unaware of it at the time, but his friend, Garnet “Ace” Bailey of the NHL’s Bruins – a hockey talent who once played with Wayne Gretzky’s Oilers in the World Hockey Association – was on board United 175, which had departed Boston’s Logan Airport for Los Angeles.“I knew I was going to hear about firefighter friends of mine from the FDNY that didn’t make it,” Leary said. “But the next day, to hear that “Ace” Bailey had died in the thing as well, we were just like, ‘That is crazy.’ I mean, it’s insanity.”Leary was already incredibly attached to New York’s Bravest.His cousin and close friend Jeremiah Lucey was a Worcester, Mass., firefighter who was one of six responders killed in a warehouse blaze in the town in 1999 — and the actor remembered how his FDNY buddies came up and helped search the building’s ruins at the time.“A lot of members of the FDNY who I was friends with had come up to help look for the bodies,” Leary recalled. The actor launched the Leary Firefighters Foundation in 2000 — and then an early supporter, FDNY Lt.

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