The Firefighter With O.C.D. and the Vaccine He Believed Would Kill Him

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The Firefighter With O.C.D. and the Vaccine He Believed Would Kill Him

By Joseph Goldstein

• April 17, 2025

There was always an awkward moment for Timmy Reen after the fire was out. Standing amid the smoke and steam and wet debris, the other firefighters would shut off their oxygen tanks and pull off their face masks. But not Firefighter Reen.

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The other guys ribbed him as they poked at ash and drywall, searching for embers. “Shut your bottle, Reen,” they’d say, nodding to his tank.

In the macho culture of the Fire Department of New York, showing too much concern over lingering smoke was a sure way to stand out. There’s a reason firefighters call themselves smoke eaters.

“Mind your own business,” he’d say. But sometimes the teasing would get to him and he’d pull his mask off. Even then, he’d hold his breath for 20 or 30 seconds before sneaking a sip of air from the mask dangling at his waist.

The funny thing was that this is what he got grief for — trying to avoid wafting carcinogens. Of all his idiosyncrasies, and there were lots, this was among the most rational.

A small sampling of the others: He brought his own sheets and pillowcase for overnights at the firehouse. He wiped down everything with his own stash of bleach wipes — including the inside of the fire engine. In his back pocket, he had a second remote control for the fire station’s TV, so he wouldn’t need to touch the shared one.

Unlike the other men in the company, he walked to work from his tidy little house on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens: a lone figure in a dark blue F.D.N.Y. uniform on a two-mile trek, along the empty beach and through vast parking lots. Firefighters waiting for the shift change would watch from the kitchen window and take turns announcing his approach: Here comes Reen, he’s trudging along, getting closer now.

What Engine Company 329 never saw was the ritual that Firefighter Reen performed after his shift. On the walk home, he would stop in a secluded part of the beach parking lot and undress, whatever the weather — shaking out his clothing, snapping his shirt and pants in the wind coming off the Atlantic, intent on ridding them of invisible particles before returning to his family.

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The ocean breeze in the Rockaways was ideal for Mr. Reen’s decontamination rituals. The ocean itself, however, was another story.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Once home, he would head to the backyard. His uniform went in a trash bag at the basement door. He’d put on a pair of shorts and a single latex glove, which allowed him to open the door without contaminating the house. Then he’d go straight to the shower, working his way through most of a bar of pink Dove soap.

For as long as he can remember, Timmy Reen has been governed by obsessions and compulsions. Most revolve around ideas of contamination. In his mind, any place outside his home that he cannot control — a restaurant, a crowded store, the firehouse — is contaminated. He has what his psychiatrist, Dr. Emma Laskin, called in an affidavit “one of the most severe cases of O.C.D.,” obsessive-compulsive disorder, she had ever seen.

The firefighter with severe O.C.D. could well be a unique medical case study: a man with a worsening disorder working in a high-stakes and unpredictable environment that is completely ill-suited to his compulsions.

Yet for 20 years he performed honorably and found great pride in being part of the Fire Department. He was a big, strong guy from a family of firefighters, and if some of the guys at the firehouse thought he was an oddball, they also viewed him as dependable. No matter the emergency, he responded with the rest of the company.

And he might still be fighting fires with Engine Company 329 if not for Covid-19.

Or, more precisely, if not for the Covid vaccine — an unbearable contamination that forced Firefighter Reen’s secret into the open and cost him his career.

“You know,” he said recently, “it probably was not the best profession that I could get into as a person who has severe O.C.D.”

Early Signs

The Fire Department exerts a tidal pull over the Rockaways, where generations of Reens have lived. Timmy Reen’s dad was a firefighter, and so were three of his uncles. The odds were always high that Timmy would grow up to be a firefighter. But he also knew he would struggle.

He recalls a family trip to Florida in the 1970s. In the back seat, Timmy, age 6, watched the passing trucks. An eighteen-wheeler was supposed to have 18 wheels. But each truck flew by too fast for an accurate count. He became frantic. He needed to count them, or something terrible would happen. His dad, up front, would grow frustrated and command, “Sit still.” A thousand miles of this.

It’s his first memory of what he would later learn was called obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Fussy or fastidious people might say they are “a little O.C.D.” But clinical O.C.D. can be a debilitating, isolating disorder, affecting perhaps 2 percent of American adults. It is defined by persistent and unwanted thoughts or urges, followed by compulsions — often performed to counteract the thoughts and urges. For some, the disorder revolves around the need to check and recheck certain objects — and the dread that something horrible will happen if they don’t. Others suffer from intrusive thoughts, typically taboo or violent. Some, like Mr. Reen, obsess over fears of contamination that they know are irrational.

Dr. Helen Blair Simpson, a psychiatry professor and O.C.D. researcher at Columbia University, recalled one patient who came to feel that an entire city in another state was contaminated. Mail originating in that city would contaminate the patient’s home if brought inside. An atlas of the United States had, by depicting that city, contaminated the room in the patient’s apartment where it sat on a bookshelf.

“For some people, the anxiety stays specific, but in others it can generalize,” Dr. Simpson said. And it can keep spreading until it takes over a person’s life.

“It Was Evil, It Was Demonic”

Mr. Reen’s childhood home was four houses down from the Rockaway shuttle, a spur of the A train that ran across the peninsula. His bedroom window faced the elevated tracks. Whenever he heard the approaching roar and clatter, he would look up and count the train cars. Sometimes it was four, sometimes six.

In those days, the train was just part of the scenery. Today it is the central preoccupation of his life.

“Probably my No. 1 scariest thing that sets me into a frenzy is the New York City subway,” Mr. Reen said. “The subway has controlled and dictated my life.”

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The Rockaway shuttle, a spur of the A train line, passed right by the childhood home of Mr. Reen.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

As a child living at the edge of the city, Mr. Reen rarely rode the subway. But one of his first jobs after high school sent him underground to put up advertisements in trains and on subway platforms. Until then, his obsessions and compulsions had mainly involved counting and repetitious behavior. But that was changing, and his time in the subway proved a catalyst.

He found himself in pervasive, subterranean dirtiness — pipes, standing water, metal dust spewed from the friction of wheels on rails. “It was contaminated,” he said. “It was evil, it was demonic.”

After quitting that job, Mr. Reen spent his 20s working for the Parks Department and managing a health club. He had married his high school crush and before long he was a father of four. He wanted to join the Fire Department, but he was initially stymied by the written test, blaming his obsessive need to read most things precisely three times.

Then, in July 2002, at the age of 32, he was finally hired by the Fire Department, part of a wave of recruits to bolster a force decimated by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

He was older than the average “probie,” or probational firefighter, but he seemed to fit right in when he was assigned to a large South Brooklyn firehouse. He was friendly and confident, and had acceptable interests: weight lifting, working out and talking sports. Three years into his career, his supervisor rated him as an aggressive firefighter who performed well under emergency conditions and got along with others. “FF Reen is an asset to this unit,” a captain wrote.

Mr. Reen did his best to hide his symptoms at the firehouse, but his family watched him growing more aloof and rigid. At his sons’ baseball games, he no longer sat in the bleachers. He stood at the left-field foul pole, far from the other parents.

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Firefighter Reen with his children in less difficult times.Credit...Timmy Reen

Mr. Reen’s children were aware of their father’s issues. The way he wouldn’t walk down certain blocks, the way he always changed his clothes outside, the way he never let them play with his uniform, unlike other firefighter fathers. And the constant sound of water running through the pipes, as he took his interminable showers.

To Mr. Reen’s youngest son, Eoin, now in college after five years in the Marine Corps, his father’s relationship to water was a mystery. He knew his dad used to love ocean swimming and surfing, but in his memories of beach days in the Rockaways, his father is almost always on the shore, filming his children boogie-boarding, or playing endless Wiffle ball with them. “I would bug him about it, ‘Come in the water, come in the water,’” he recalled. The response was always the same. Dad stayed on the beach.

“I don’t know the explanation for why he doesn’t go in,” Eoin said recently. “And I don’t think I’ll ever find out.”

“Total Faith in Tim”

Mr. Reen first saw a therapist at 13, and he has tried various medications and long bouts of exposure therapy, which forces patients to confront their triggers and resist their compulsions. But for some people, the success of these interventions can be limited.

As part of his therapy, Mr. Reen has tried on a few occasions to go home and delay his usual decontamination rituals. But after a few hours, when he finally could tolerate it no longer, he found himself overwhelmed: He needed to do a deep clean of every room he had been in. “Because I tried to be tough, now I’ve got to spend 15 hours, not eating or drinking, just washing everything,” he recalled. Over the years, he stopped trying to resist.

More than half of O.C.D. patients who receive both medication and exposure therapy show meaningful improvement. But for those who don’t get better, symptoms sometimes worsen with age. “When O.C.D. has too much time,” Dr. Simpson, the Columbia researcher, said, “it really can run amok.”

Mr. Reen’s first O.C.D. crisis in the Fire Department came early: a memorial service at Madison Square Garden to honor firefighters who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. He and the rest of his company rode the train together from Brooklyn. “I had to board the subway in my Class A uniform,” he recalled. The uniform — the fancy one with the peaked cap and the metal F.D.N.Y. insignia — was now contaminated, and he stuffed it all into a bag when he got home. A few years later, unable to clean it to his satisfaction, he simply threw it out. That was the last time he rode the subway.

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Firefighters attended a 9/11 memorial service at Madison Square Garden for those who died at the World Trade Center.Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

But even above ground, he was not free of the subway, and his mind devised new torments. He was in a bodega once, buying a bottle of water. As he pocketed the change, the thought hit him: Those dollar bills, those coins, they have all been on the subway at some point. As his fingertips touched the money in his pocket, he felt something like a current of electricity run through him.

“I’m as good as being on the subway,” he thought.

So began the washing of money. With liquid soap and scalding water, wearing rubber gloves. It was so onerous that he stopped accepting $1 bills as change, leaving them on the counter.

A few years later, he was at the beach, just as he had been a thousand times before. As he watched swimmers and children playing in the surf, a thought emerged. Some of those beachgoers had arrived by the A train. The idea lodged in his mind like a barbed hook: The subway had contaminated the Atlantic Ocean.

Apart from his therapist, Mr. Reen never told anyone about the contamination of money or the ocean. Though he felt a constant sense of isolation and shame, he said, it never prevented him from doing his job. He has responded to dozens of fires over his career, he said, and countless other emergencies, including water rescues, and he pulled his weight. In interviews, firefighters who worked with him at Engine 329 said the same.

“I had total faith in Tim,” said Bill Dunigan, who retired from the Fire Department in 2019 and joined Firefighter Reen on a number of emergency runs. “He performed admirably, was in the thick of it and did his job.”

In interviews, Mr. Reen explained that as a firefighter, when there was a job to do, he simply did it, accepting that he was now “contaminated.” He almost looked forward to it. “Being in a contaminated state is almost a sigh of relief,” he said; it meant there was nothing more to guard against. The worst part came afterward.

Everything depended on his decontaminating before he returned home, or his entire house would be contaminated. The drive home from the Brooklyn firehouse posed its own problem. It meant that not only was he contaminated, but his car was, too. So after each shift, when he stopped in a parking lot by the ocean to shake out his clothes, he needed to air out his car and run a lint roller over every inch of the interior. “A hideous process,” he recalled.

Yet the more he cleaned, he said, the more he loathed himself. He should be with his family, not in an empty parking lot. “I know that it’s all nonsense,” he said, referring to his decontamination rituals. “And yet here I am.”

One solution was to walk to work, so around 2010, he transferred to Engine Company 329 in the Rockaways, just two miles from home.

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No matter the weather, Mr. Reen would walk the two miles from his home to Engine Company 329 in the Rockaways.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

The firehouse was a pleasant place with a slower tempo: fewer fires, the occasional water rescue when lifeguards were off-duty, a breeze off the ocean. During the summer, families on their way to the beach would stop to let their children admire the fire truck. The firefighters were a close-knit group, with only five guys on each tour. Mr. Reen felt like he had found a home.

He contrived half-convincing ways to hide his anxieties. Communal meals are an important part of firehouse culture, but he couldn’t bear to watch anyone handle food that he would eat. So on a spaghetti day, for example, he made sure he was the guy rolling the meatballs.

“Go watch the game,” he’d tell the other guys. “Let me take care of this. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine.”

Most firefighters were happy to go along.

“I just thought he was meticulous to a fault,” Mr. Dunigan, the retired colleague, said. “I had no idea.”

The Ultimate Contamination

Mr. Reen had been at Engine Company 329 for nearly a decade when the coronavirus pandemic hit. The prospect of actual viral contamination didn’t worry him much. He regarded himself as robust and healthy. He watched as other people began washing their hands as though their lives depended on it. “I’ve been living Covid protocols for 40 years,” he reflected.

But when vaccines became available, he felt dread. He grew obsessed with the idea that an injection of this new vaccine could put him in a permanent state of contamination, an unbearable thought.

In late 2021, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that all New York City workers must be vaccinated. To many firefighters, the mandate felt like an insult. They had worked with little protection during the pandemic’s deadliest phase. Many assumed they must have some natural immunity. Thousands of firefighters — more than 40 percent of the department — were unvaccinated when the mayor announced the mandate. Was this their reward for serving the city? To be fired if they refused a vaccine?

By late 2021, close to 2,000 F.D.N.Y. employees had sought a religious or medical exemption, according to legal papers filed by a Fire Department lawyer. Mr. Reen’s request was among them, though his stood out.

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A 2021 protest against Mayor Bill de Blasio’s mandate that city workers be vaccinated against Covid-19.Credit...Jeenah Moon/Associated Press

“Due to my severe mental illness I am unable to inject anything that stays in my body for a length of time,” he wrote in neat block letters in his request for an exemption. “Doing so,” he concluded, “would result in suicide.”

His request included letters from past psychiatrists affirming the seriousness of his O.C.D. Like most everyone else’s, his request was denied. He appealed.

Around the start of 2022, Mr. Reen was summoned to the Fire Department’s headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn. What happened there became the subject of a lawsuit that he would file a year later.

A department psychiatrist asked if he was suicidal, Mr. Reen’s suit says. Mr. Reen responded, according to court papers, that he was not suicidal. He was fine, he said, so long as the vaccine was not forced on him. A top Fire Department medical officer, Dr. Karen Hurwitz, joined the meeting. “Just get the damn shot; you are not getting an exemption,” she shouted at him, according to the lawsuit.

When the meeting was over, Mr. Reen said, Dr. Hurwitz had three fire marshals escort him into an ambulance waiting out front. The ambulance took Mr. Reen to a Brooklyn hospital for a psychiatric eval‎uation. Two doctors examined him and concluded that there was no reason to admit him, he said. He was sent home.

Dr. Hurwitz did not respond to a request for comment, and a spokesman for the Fire Department declined to comment, citing Mr. Reen’s continuing lawsuit. But at a court hearing in July, a lawyer for the city defended Dr. Hurwitz’s actions, noting that Mr. Reen’s handwritten vaccine exemption request had sparked concern.

“He wrote he would commit suicide,” the lawyer, Kathleen Linnane, said at the July hearing, “in giant capital letters.”

“The F.D.N.Y. denied his request and called him to headquarters because they were afraid he had suicidal ideation,” Ms. Linnane said. Dr. Hurwitz, she added, had sent him to the hospital to be eval‎uated. “The doctor has every right to do that,” Ms. Linnane said.

“That Little Life, They Took Away From Me”

Among the rank-and-file firefighters, the gossip began to circulate: Timmy Reen from Engine 329 was having some sort of mental crisis.

When Mr. Reen returned to the firehouse a week or so later, he tried to clear the air. “‘I just want you guys to know you shouldn’t have to worry about me being able to do this job,’” another firefighter recalled Mr. Reen telling the guys.

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Mr. Reen’s handwritten application for an exemption to the Covid-19 vaccine caused alarm at the Fire Department, a lawyer for the city said.Credit...Timmy Reen

He continued showing up to work, awaiting the results of his appeal. But for the next nine months, he burned with humiliation, certain that his colleagues now regarded him as the weak link on the hose line. His already severe O.C.D. “went into overdrive,” he said, as it often did in times of stress.

In Mr. Reen’s view, Dr. Hurwitz’s decision to send him to the hospital had the effect of outing him. For 20 years he had tried to keep his O.C.D. a secret. He had built a stable, if fragile, life for himself. He was, he noted, “a contributing member of society,” no small thing given the severity of his condition. “That little tiny life that I crafted, that I had — that little life, they took away from me.”

In September 2022, he received a brief email from the Fire Department: His appeal had been denied. He had three days to get vaccinated or be suspended and, eventually, fired.

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“I know that it’s all nonsense,” Mr. Reen said, referring to his decontamination rituals. “And yet here I am.”Credit...Timmy Reen

Like most firefighters, he had planned to work 25 years, which would have significantly boosted his pension. But he could not stay on if it meant receiving the vaccine. “My O.C.D. wouldn’t allow it,” he said. “I would have no way of decontaminating myself.”

He resigned on Sept. 15, 2022, at age 53, after 20 years in the department.

Five months after Mr. Reen put in his retirement papers, a new mayor, Eric Adams, lifted the vaccine mandate. By Feb. 10, 2023, New York City firefighters no longer had to be vaccinated. For Mr. Reen, it was too late.

Always Upwind

These days, Mr. Reen is living on a firefighter’s pension. He is in the middle of a divorce. Days pass in isolation. He plots each trip outside his apartment, choosing his route based on wind direction, the location of sewer grates, the likelihood of encountering a garbage truck.

For this article, I interviewed Mr. Reen by telephone on at least a dozen occasions. Nearly every time, he said he was calling from the vast lot at Jacob Riis Park, seated in his black Dodge Durango, which he keeps immaculate.

He agreed to meet in person there on one occasion, at my insistence, so that a photographer could take his picture. He insisted we stand about 50 yards downwind from him at all times. But it was impossible to have a conversation, so we took out our phones. Even then, the wind blowing in off the ocean was too loud for much discussion.

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Mr. Reen agreed to pose for a portrait provided the photographer not get too close.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

He was apologetic and embarrassed, but he knew that if we came any closer, he would deem himself contaminated, and as soon as he got in his car, it too would be contaminated. That would mean hours in a decontamination frenzy: working over the interior of the car with a toothbrush, a lint roller and wipes, until perhaps 1 or 2 a.m. “That’s what I’m trying to avoid,” he said. It was easier, he said, to keep his distance.

Mr. Reen had long had a bedrock conviction that apart from his mental disorder, he was a good man. But today he feels mostly shame, for all the time he devoted to his compulsions instead of to his family. “I wasted a good life,” he reflected, his voice thick with disgust. “I’ve destroyed and ruined a life with this stuff.”

He still has a few friends who call to check in. He sees one of his two grandchildren every week. And there is one other thing he looks forward to. Now that the weather is getting warmer, every few weeks he will play golf with his three grown sons, usually at a public course in Brooklyn. Two of them are now firefighters.

He shows up about two hours early to wipe down everything he intends to touch and to prepare himself mentally so he can focus on his boys. But there are certain rules. No one can touch his clubs, and no one can pull his ball from the cup, which he must do himself.

Even then, he is monitoring the wind. To avoid the risk of contamination, it’s always better if he is upwind from other people, even his sons.

Read by Joseph Goldstein

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond

Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York for The Times, following years of criminal justice and police reporting.