The New York Daily News has this story, first reported in OTBKB last week, about the plaque in honor of David Fontana that was stolen; the headline reads: COWARDS INSULT A HERO!

Twisted pranksters ripped off a memorial plaque
for fallen 9/11 Firefighter Dave Fontana from outside his old Brooklyn
home – on the day after the fourth anniversary of his death.

"They took Daddy’s plaque?" a heartbroken Aidan Fontana, 9, asked his mother, Marian, at their new home in Staten Island. "Why?"

The 9-inch-by-12-inch bronze plaque – dedicated Dec. 22, 2002, to the
Squad 1 hero – had lain alongside the base of a tree in front of his
former Park Slope brownstone.

The simple message read, "In memory of Firefighter Dave Fontana,
1-0/17/63 – 9/11/01. Beloved husband, father, neighbor, artist, hero."

Its only anchor was a foot-long metal spike, as no one imagined it
would be a target for thieves in the generally crime-free neighborhood,
which is also home to Fontana’s firehouse.

But sometime between 1:15 p.m. and 3:15 p.m. on Sept. 12, the well-tended memorial disappeared.

"I’d like to believe that people aren’t that cruel, and that it was
just a stupid prank," said Marian Fontana, who got the troubling news
while speaking about her new book, "A Widow’s Walk," at the New York
Academy of Sciences.

"Why anyone would want to take something like that is beyond my comprehension," she said yesterday.

Fontana added that she had just visited the plaque on the solemn anniversary of the terror attacks.

After attending Mass with other widows and firefighters at her late
husband’s firehouse, Fontana went to the spot where he proposed to her
in Prospect Park and to their former home to pause at the plaque.

Fontana said she was disturbed by the theft – and urged whoever stole the plaque to "just put it back where it belongs."

Dave Fontana was an avid sculptor who originally signed up for the Fire Department to make time for his art.

He had even worked a 24-hour shift into the morning of Sept. 11, 2001,
sohe could meet Marian for aprivate viewing of the Whitney Museum’s
sculpture garden on their eighth wedding anniversary.

The friends who designed and created the plaque – former neighbor Sarah
Greene and former landlords Sally and Kevin O’Connell – have plastered
the area with flyers offering a $100 reward for its safe return.

But if necessary, they are already prepared to buy another one at a cost of nearly $1,000.

"It just makes us feel that all the goodwill that we all felt after
9/11 gets tossed out in a bucket," Greene said of the theft. "We’re
just incredulous that anyone could be so selfish or so uncaring."

With Rivka Bukowsky