Exactly 25 years after he witnessed first responders heroically rushing to Ground Zero as a child in Brooklyn, the experience came full circle last Friday, when NYPD Sgt. Ruben Cespedes was awarded the Purple Heart for his military service in Afghanistan.
“I remember seeing firefighters, police officers, all types of first responders, just helping out, running towards danger,” said Cespedes, who grew up in Crown Heights and was in middle school when 9/11 happened.
“That day, just walking home from school, one of the things that stood out to me was the police cars,” Cespedes recalled. “It was lines of police cars driving down Eastern Parkway, going towards Manhattan.”
His experience on 9/11 was one of the driving forces that motivated him to join the military when he turned 18, Cespedes said. A quarter of a century later, Cespedes received a Purple Heart — one of the military’s most venerable awards, given to service members killed or wounded in action — in a ceremony at Fort Totten in Queens.
In 2009, Cespedes deployed to the Logar Province of Afghanistan and was on a rescue mission in the middle of the night when the vehicle he was in encountered an IED and exploded.
“We went out of the base to assist other service members who were in combat,” he recalled. “On the way to their location, as we were driving through the valley, I remember I had on my night vision goggles. I remember seeing a flash, and then hearing a loud boom. I remember going down. I felt something hit me in the face, and I went down, and I remember coming back up, and it was just pitch black,” Cespedes said.
He sustained injuries from the debris and shrapnel hitting his face, and was discharged from the military in 2010.
Back home in New York, Cespedes joined the NYPD in 2012, and was assigned to the 77th Precinct in Crown Heights, where he grew up, and the 75th Precinct in East New York, as well as to the citywide Community Response Team, the Drug Enforcement Task Force and the Gun Violence Suppression Division. He was promoted to sergeant in 2024.
In addition to the courage he witnessed on 9/11, Cespedes credits the mentorship he received through the NYPD’s Police Explorers Program as fostering his continuing desire to serve his community.