In Victims' Deaths, a Wide Slice of Life
Only a Few Could Reflect on the End; Now Survivors Have Only Reflections
By Amy Goldstein, Shankar Vedantam and Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 13, 2001; Page A09
A rare few got a chance to say goodbye.
"Please be happy," said the familiar voice on the answering machine in Julie Sweeney's home. "Please live your life. That's an order."
The message had come from her husband, Brian. He was 38 years old, a passenger on a United Airlines jet hijacked by terrorists and headed for New York. He said it didn't look good. I love you, he said, and I hope to talk to you again. If I don't, I'll see you in the next world.
The time was 8:58 a.m. Tuesday. His life would be over in precisely five minutes.
That's just one victim, among what may turn out to be thousands. The first official lists of names were released Wednesday, but countless people are still considered missing, their bodies apparently entombed in steel and concrete in lower Manhattan or under smoldering rubble at the Pentagon.
Hundreds of victims were trained rescuers who raced to the scene of the crisis. Most of the dead, however, were blindsided. A great number were businesspeople who were doing what businesspeople do -- arriving for work, taking meetings, flying to the coast. Theirs was an ordinary morning that slammed into an extraordinary fate.
Ronnie Clifford, visiting the World Trade Center when the second plane plunged into the south tower, managed to escape with his life -- only to learn that his sister, Ruth Clifford McCourt, and 4-year-old niece, Juliana, were passengers on the jet.
The Rev. Mychal Judge died giving a man last rites. The priest, a chaplain with the New York City Fire Department, had rushed to the World Trade Center. While tending the soul of a victim, he was crushed by falling debris.
Judge, 68, will be remembered Saturday in one of the first funerals since Tuesday's tragedy. The church holds 800; it'll be packed. "Father Mike" was the priest from central casting: white-haired, rosy-cheeked, "a map of Ireland on his face." That's the description of his old friend Harry Ryttenberg, who sat Wednesday in Father Mike's room at the St. Francis of Assisi Friary -- a cell only 10 feet by 8 feet, with a desk, a chair, a couch that turned into a bed. Ryttenberg said the priest gave away almost all his possessions. He took seriously his vow of poverty.
"If he was alive today," said Ryttenberg, "no doubt he'd say just put me in a cardboard box and plant me in the ground."
Some victims apparently died fighting. Passengers on the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania possibly prevented the terrorists from flying the craft all the way to Washington.
Thomas Burnett, a 38-year-old senior utive with Thoratec Corp., which makes medical devices, wasn't supposed to be on the flight. He changed his itinerary at the last minute so he could return home early. Burnett, a former high school quarterback with busts of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Churchill in his office, told his wife, Deena, that he and a few other passengers were going to try to divert the plane from its target.
He may have had help from Mark Bingham, a 6-foot 4-inch rugby player. Bingham had his own communications company and was returning home from a business trip. Mixing it up with the hijackers would come naturally to him; he'd scampered in the streets of Pamplona recently for the running of the bulls.
The victims had, in some cases, rich personal histories and exotic ambitions. Environmental lawyer Alan A. Beaven of Oakland, Calif., was about to begin a year-long sabbatical in Bombay as a volunteer. Born in New Zealand, he'd led a peripatetic life featuring stints as a law professor, a lead prosecutor for Scotland Yard, a lawyer in Lisbon and investment representative in Hong Kong.
His San Francisco law partner Joe Tabacco said Beaven had done groundbreaking work in California, uprooting corruption at municipal water plants. In California style, he played tennis and practiced meditation and yoga. "He became quite a gadfly," said Tabacco.
Those who died reflected the diverse textures of American life. Jeff Mladenik, on American Airlines Flight 11, was ordained two years ago as a minister by the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. Traveling for his company, E-Logic, he was "a Christian who walked his faith every day and in every way," a friend said yesterday.
Aboard the United flight from Boston were Ronald Gamboa and his partner, Dan Brandhorst, who treasured travel and were on their way home to Los Angeles with their 3-year-old adopted son.
Some of Tuesday's victims were looking ahead in their lives to special events. Tom Pecorelli, a 30-year-old FoxSports Net cameraman flying from Boston, was anticipating his second wedding anniversary in early October, then the birth of a child in April. Jeffrey Coombs, of Abington, Mass., a program manager for Compaq Computer Corp. heading to the West Coast on a business trip, planned to go hiking in the Grand Canyon. In the meantime, he doted on three kids, coached soccer, volunteered, and served as a Mason and a Shriner.
For some of the airline passengers, air travel was as mundane as a trip to the corner grocery. Peter A. Gay had taken American Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles every week since January, when he began to shuttle across country for his long-term employer, Raytheon Co. He'd become such a regular that the pilots and flight attendants knew him by first name. Perhaps, said his son, Jonathan Gay, he could take comfort in his final moments from the fact that he was not among strangers.
"As lonely inside as he might have felt, these people were there with him," Jonathan Gay said.
David Kovalcin, 42, a Raytheon test engineer and father of two young daughters, was also on the flight. His wife, Elizabeth, learned of his death from the television. Any hope she had was extinguished when she answered the door and saw two Raytheon utives. Her sister, Heather Yerry, said she's contemplating her husband's funeral. "When there's a body, you have to act very quickly. In this situation, you don't," the sister said.
Another passenger on a routine business trip, Charles "Chuck" Jones, had always been entranced by flight. He'd even had a brush with airborne catastrophe. As an Air Force officer, Jones qualified as a payload specialist on the space shuttle and was preparing to go into orbit when the Challenger exploded in January 1986. Jones's mission was canceled, and he never made it into space.
A program manager for BAI s, a defense firm, Jones had been dropped off at Boston's Logan Airport by the company limousine. His routine was to fall asleep almost immediately after the flight took off. A family friend said that Jones's wife, Jeanette, has been hoping fervently since Tuesday that he somehow managed to remain alseep to the very end.
Tara Creamer, of Worcester, Mass., was a more reluctant traveler. With a 4-year-old son, a year-old daughter and a responsible job as a planning manager for a company that ran department stores, she "was able to balance her family life and her work the right way," according to her father-in-law, Gerald Creamer.
That balance meant finding work with a company -- TJX Corp., which runs the T.J. Maxx and Marshall's department stores -- that offered day care. It also meant keeping business trips rare and short. She traveled for work perhaps once a year. This time she planned to dash to the West Coast on Tuesday, do her job and return to Massachusetts. She hoped to be home today.
Carol Bouchard, 43, and Renee Newell, 37, were friends from suburban towns near Providence, R.I., who decided they needed to get away and have some fun. Family friend Ed Lamontagne said Newell, an airport technology worker, needed to go to Las Vegas for a one-day business conference.
She invited her friend Bouchard, an emergency worker at Kent County Hospital in Warwick, R.I., to tag along so the pair could dally in Vegas a bit. They would change planes in Los Angeles. Said Lamontagne, "This was just a weekend with the girls."
With its Los Angeles destination, the flights that left Boston carried a contingent from the entertainment industry -- famous and not. Actress and photographer Berry Berenson, 53, had taken a vacation on Cape Cod, Mass., and was on her way home to rejoin her sons, Elvis and Osgood, in Los Angeles. She was the widow of actor Anthony Perkins and the sister of actress Marisa Berenson. She recently authored a book on the designer Halston.
The citizens of the college town of Durham, N.H., are coping with the loss of a familiar, tenured figure, geography professor Robert G. LeBlanc. Students had thronged his classes. He was a towering figure, literally -- tall, craggy, with the trademark professorial mop of salt-and-pepper hair and a bushy white beard. Retired since 1999, he still could be found at his regular Durham lunch spot, the Bagelry, debating the issues of the day with other professors and students. He died flying to Los Angeles for a geography conference.
"His physical presence was something to behold. . . . You never could help but smile when you saw him coming," said Ted Kirkpatrick, associate dean of liberal arts at the University of New Hampshire.
Each victim Tuesday might be the locus of grief for dozens or even hundreds of people -- friends, colleagues, family. Among the missing is Richard Keane, an insurance consultant from Hartford, Conn., father of five grown sons, the eldest of eight siblings, married for 31 years, active in his church. He drove three elderly blind women to church every Sunday. His passion is gardening; he has been building rock walls in his back yard.
Keane left home at 5 a.m. Tuesday to drive to the train station and head to Manhattan. His wife, Judy, left messages for him at his midtown office as the morning wore on: Call me, I'm getting worried, she said. She had no idea that he'd had an early meeting on the 99th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.
His wife fears that he may have stayed in the building to help others escape. And one thing is certain: He liked his life.
"His favorite expression," she said, "is, 'You know, I'm a hell of a guy..' "
© 2001 The Washington Post Company