At 8:05 p.m. on May 23, 2026, a fire box was struck in the Savin Hill section of Dorchester, Massachusetts.
The address came back as 18 Treadway Road, a two and a half story wood frame house on a narrow street where the homes stand close enough to share a fence line.
Smoke was showing from the rear of the building when the first engines reached the scene five minutes later. A second alarm went out within two minutes of that.
Robert Kilduff Jr. was working that night with Rescue Company 2, the unit Boston sends into a fire's most dangerous positions. He was 53 years old, a 24-year veteran of the department, and a third-generation firefighter.
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Earlier that same day, Kilduff had helped free a homeless man trapped in a confined space at an MBTA rail yard nearby. A month before that, a fellow firefighter had suffered cardiac arrest at a different fire scene, and Kilduff rode with him to the hospital and performed CPR the whole way.
The blaze on Treadway Road climbed through all three floors of the house. Five people had been inside when it started, and firefighters worked the structure until every one of them was out.
By around 8:30 p.m., the fire had grown to three alarms, but crews believed they had knocked down the worst of it. Kilduff and another Rescue 2 firefighter stayed on the fire floor, checking the rear porch for anyone left behind and for signs the structure would hold.
At 8:50 p.m., Kilduff told the firefighters near him to get back.
Moments later, the porch gave way. Kilduff fell three stories to the ground below.
Mayday went out over the radio. Boston paramedics and EMTs rushed him to Boston Medical Center.
He died there shortly after midnight. He was the first Boston firefighter to die in the line of duty in more than a decade.
All five residents of 18 Treadway Road survived. The fire never spread to the houses on either side of it.
Kilduff was a Marine veteran and the father of two grown children. Back at his firehouse, his crew outlined where he had set his boots down the night of the fire, his initials written inside the outline.
He had gotten everyone else out of that house before the porch gave way under him.
What would you do, you who have something to lose?