Police Officer James Godbee began directing traffic just outside the World Trade Center site two days after Sept. 11, 2001, working hundreds of hours before developing a cough.

He died in 2004 of sarcoidosis, a disease that studies have linked to inhalation of toxic dust that hung over the towers' ruins for months. But because he was not at the trade center when the towers collapsed, the city medical examiner has declined to add him to the official Sept. 11 victims' list.