Quake Missing: Only 2 Names Remain on List

A week after the Bay Area’s killer earthquake, Elliot Clark was one of the last people to be removed from the Oakland Police Department’s missing persons list.

Clark, whose mother had reported him missing the day after the quake, was found last Tuesday when he appeared in court for arraignment on burglary charges.

“We crossed our fingers he would show for his court date,” said Oakland Police Officer Gary Foppiano, one of the main investigators searching for the missing. “He did.”

And so the missing were accounted for, gradually, methodically. A list of names that once topped 280--and fanned fears that the quake’s death toll would reach a number four times what it now appears to be--had dwindled to two by week’s end.

Some of the missing would turn up on a coroner’s list, their bodies pulled from the wreckage of the fallen Nimitz Freeway.

But many others, the majority in fact, would be accounted for through more mundane circumstances: They were in jail, they were spending a night away from home and had neglected to tell anybody, they were out of town.

The task of whittling down the missing persons list, fed by worried calls from as far away as Spain and Finland, involved basic detective work coupled with a large dose of common sense, persistent phone-checking and knocking on doors.

“We were surprised we could get through it (the list) so fast,” Foppiano said.

Most names on the list came out of telephone calls from friends, family members or co-workers reporting someone had dropped out of sight. Other names were added when crumpled cars were recovered from the Nimitz wreckage and the drivers, whose names usually could be traced from the license plates, could not be found at home or in hospitals.

Investigators worked from two ends: Oakland police tracked people; the California Highway Patrol tracked vehicles.

From the first hours after the Oct. 17 quake, 20 police officers and support personnel staffed a dozen telephone lines around the clock to take missing persons reports. The phone number went out nationwide, and more than 1,000 calls poured in.

The calls were screened. Did the possible victim have reason to be in Oakland? What was the likelihood he or she would have been on the Nimitz Freeway? Some reports were vague--people who said they had relatives “visiting California.” Others were more specific, signaling the Nimitz Freeway as the missing person’s normal route home.

The most remote, unlikely reports were discounted out of hand. The rest were recorded and investigated. First, officers would call back the person who filed the report every four hours to check whether the missing person had returned.

That process eliminated scores of names. Through the early days, the numbers on the list fluctuated wildly--up as high as 281 one day, down to fewer than 100 and then back up.

“The names were constantly changing, the numbers were constantly changing,” recalled Oakland Police Capt. Jim Hahn. “You’d locate four people, five more would be called in. . . . “I guess we’re going to have one heck of a phone bill,” Hahn continued. “We were calling all over the place.”

Police also received a fax every six hours from hospitals updating their lists of injured. This, too, helped to weed out names from the list of the missing.

As calls were being made, Highway Patrol and Fire Department rescue teams were recovering cars and license plates from the Nimitz wreckage. Owners were being traced through the plates, and investigators began matching those names with names on the missing persons list.

By last Sunday, police believed that most cars on the freeway had been located, and 38 bodies had been recovered. Forty-seven people remained unaccounted for, according to Sgt. Greg Hughes, head of the Police Protective Services unit that includes the missing persons bureau.

At that point, Hughes assigned two investigators to each name. Officers began knocking on doors, visiting family and friends, leaving notices on vacant houses asking residents to check with authorities, talking to neighbors.

Police from as far as Coral Gables, Fla., the listed address for one of those reported missing, were called on to help track down people.

A Bakersfield man was reported missing by a friend and could not be located for days because he and his wife were out of town on vacation. Another man, reported missing by his wife in Washington, was AWOL from the Navy and claimed to be suffering from a concussion that had left him disoriented, police said.

In addition to checking car and license registrations with the Department of Motor Vehicles, police were also researching criminal “rap sheets” to find arrest records. Some of the missing, at that point, were located in county jails. Others had court dates--like Elliot Clark--for which they eventually surfaced.

At the same time that police were making their checks, the California Highway Patrol was tracing the plates on cars found at the site. In several cases, they had to pursue a twisted paper trail because registrations were out of date or improperly recorded.

The shells of 56 vehicles and two truck trailers remained trapped in the Nimitz Freeway rubble as of Friday, their drivers accounted for in all but two cases. Those last two cases were the only names left on the missing persons list Friday, Hahn said, and police believe the two died on the freeway and their bodies are entombed in concrete.

Many cars were found empty, their drivers having fled in the panicked moments when the highway overpass they were traveling on began to shake violently. Some made it, others did not.

One woman who survived the Nimitz disaster abandoned her car in the mangled concrete, but did not report her whereabouts to authorities because she was so traumatized, California Highway Patrol Officer Randy Price said.

For four days, until she finally came forward, she was another name on the missing persons list because her empty car had been retrieved in rescue operations.

“She just couldn’t deal with it,” Price said. “If you get out of something like that unscathed, you are jubilant. Your first priority is not to contact the police and tell them you survived.”

One name on the missing persons list was that of Buck Helm, the longshoreman pulled from his crushed car Oct. 21, four days after the quake. As soon as Helm was discovered, but before he was identified and rescued, a homicide detective at the scene called Sgt. Hughes on a cellular phone with the license plate number. Hughes matched it to Helm’s name on the missing persons list.

Because so many of the names on the list could be easily accounted for, some question has arisen about whether the Police Department should have released what turned out to be an inflated number of missing.

Hahn said he repeatedly tried to caution journalists not to read too much into initial numbers of missing.

But, in the early chaos that engulfed recovery operations at the Nimitz Freeway disaster scene, Alameda County Sheriff Charles Plummer added to fears that the toll was much higher by announcing that 250 people were believed killed in the collapse. Plummer has since been quoted as saying his department was “shooting from the hip.”

Hahn said that although the number of missing first announced now seems exaggerated, police were acting as responsibly as they could in difficult circumstances.

“It worked out well considering the number of calls we had and reports we took,” Hahn said. “It was an awful lot of people to track down in a short period of time.”