
March 24, 2002
Tickle Monster
t 41, Robert Fazio Jr. was still single. People would ask him when
he was going to marry. But the pressure of society's conventions,
said his sister, Carole Lovero, could not affect his decisions.
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Robert
Fazio, Jr. |
"He was a happy person, he was happy within himself,"
she said. "He would have gotten married if he had found the
right person, but he was happy doing what he was doing."
What he was doing, outside of his job as a patrolman for the New
York Police Department, was working on motorcycles, cars, boats
and houses for anybody who needed a hand. "Half my neighbors,
he fixed their cars," said Officer Fazio's father, Robert Sr.
Shortly after he got his driver's license, Robert Fazio Jr. could
be seen on the weekend in front of the family's house in South Hempstead,
on Long Island, hoisting engines in and out of cars with the help
of a sturdy tree limb.
He had worked for the Police Department for 17 years and was called
from his precinct in the East 20's on Sept. 11 to help people out
of the shopping plaza beneath the World Trade Center. He had less
than three years to go until retirement, his father said, and planned
on setting up a motorcycle and car repair shop somewhere near his
home in Freeport, N.Y., with a friend from junior high school, Gino
Lanza. But though he had no children of his own, he spent as much
time as he could baby-sitting for his nephew, Michael Lovero, and
friends' children, who nicknamed him the Tickle Monster.

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