Mychal Fallon Judge, O.F.M. (born Robert Emmett Judge; May 11, 1933 – September 11, 2001), was a Franciscan friar and Catholic Priest who served as a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. It was while serving in that capacity that he was killed, becoming the first certified fatality of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Judge was the son of immigrants from Co Leitrim. Growing up in poverty in Brooklyn during the Great Depression, he watched his father die a slow and painful death from mastoiditis, a condition that can develop after untreated ear infections. Shining shoes outside Penn Station as a child, he would visit the Franciscan Friars at St Francis of Assisi Church. His vocation came from his observation of their simple way of life.
At the age of 15 in 1948, after studying with the Franciscans at the St Francis Preparatory School, he began the process of joining the Order of Friars Minor. He was ordained in 1961, and spent the following decades serving communities in Boston, the Bronx, New Jersey, and finally Manhattan.
He was a peacemaker. In 1986, when Detective Steven McDonald was shot in Central Park by a youth and left paralysed, Judge prayed with the victim and later brought about a reconciliation between the two. Judge and Detective McDonald became lifelong friends and visited a number of communities going through processes of reconciliation, including Northern Ireland and Sarajevo.