Mayor Calls Detective Hero but Adds to the Confusion

After a week of intense criticism, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg retreated yesterday from previous remarks and said a retired police detective who died at age 34 after working hundreds of hours at ground zero was indeed a hero.

The mayor appeared, however, to immediately set off more confusion, when after a meeting with Mr. Bloomberg, the detective’s father said he expected the city medical examiner to re-examine the case.

Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, the chief medical examiner, concluded last month that the death of the detective, James Zadroga, in January 2006 was not connected to his work at the World Trade Center, and that material found in his lungs resulted not from inhaling toxic dust at ground zero, but from injecting ground-up prescription drugs.

That finding departed from previous medical assessments.

The mayor “said Hirsch may have made a mistake,” the family’s lawyer, Michael Barasch, told reporters after the half-hour private meeting in City Hall.

Mr. Barasch said Mr. Bloomberg said he would ask a deputy mayor “to have Hirsch reconsider his findings.”

At a news conference later, however, a top aide to Mr. Bloomberg sought emphatically to dispel any expectation that Mr. Bloomberg would ask Dr. Hirsch to rethink his findings.