Families’ Slim Hopes Dashed in Crash Briefing

The picture showed a young man, slender, dark-haired, smiling. It was all he had left of his brother, said 37-year-old Sayed Hussein. That, and the memory of the hug he and Ismail shared at LAX Saturday evening as the 32-year-old baby of the Hussein family boarded EgyptAir Flight 990 for the long trip home.

For the last 5 1/2 months, the brothers roomed together at Sayed’s place in Laguna Beach. But Ismail, a car dealer in Giza, grew restless. “He was homesick. He was Mom’s baby, the family favorite,” the older brother said in a quavering voice. Now, in the swift succession of seconds that it took the 767 aircraft to fall into the sea off Nantucket Island early Sunday morning, he was gone.

“We believe God gives and takes,” Sayed Hussein said. “It was time for him to go. Nobody gets insurance in this life.”

At the Doubletree Hotel here, a large brick structure that sits on a small island in Newport’s famous harbor, Hussein was one of about 200 relatives of the victims of Sunday’s air crash who converged Tuesday on a family assistance center set up by the National Transportation Safety Board and a host of other agencies. They came from across Canada and the United States, and by late Tuesday--despite a Customs snafu in New York--from Egypt and other countries as well.

They came, even as late as Tuesday, with wild hopes that perhaps, somehow, their loved ones had survived.

“My sister, she still does not believe that what happened, happened,” Nada Eissa of Calgary, Canada, said as he waited outside the hotel for his sister Enes to arrive from Cairo and to learn that her husband was definitely dead.

At an agonizing briefing Tuesday, families also learned the cruel physics of this kind of air disaster: More than likely, no bodies of the 217 victims to claim, and only fragments to identify and bury. This news sent ululations through the hotel.

“People were screaming and crying because it was so unexpected to hear that,” said George Arian, the publisher of an Egyptian newspaper in New Jersey who is serving as a spokesman for many of the families.

Informed by NTSB officials that body pieces might be as small as a finger, two people fell to the floor, Arian said. An ambulance carried one relative to a hospital.

To put it bluntly, said Mike Crow of Seattle, who lost four relatives in the crash, “they made it pretty clear that if we get any loved ones back, we’ll be lucky.”

Slowly, the grim details of an investigation that officials said could go on for years began to surface. Relatives were asked to provide dental records and X-rays to help identify body parts. Bob Hayes, coordinator of mental health professionals for the Red Cross here, said family members were scheduling medical interviews with the possibility of providing DNA samples as well.

The anxiety, said Hayes, was taking its toll. “People are experiencing the stress. You can see the physical symptoms.”

A sense of shock was most common, Hayes said. “Maybe you hear people question why things happen like this. And still people are hoping that they will be asked to identify bodies, that they will be able to take them home and have burials.” But like so much of this ordeal, no one could say when that might be.

Fortress-like in appearance, the hotel resembled a bunker. Guards blocked entrances and grilled passengers of incoming cars for credentials and identification. Officials wearing jackets with huge letters to announce their affiliations--NYPD, FBI, NTSB, MAYOR’S OFFICE--swept the halls to drive off intruders, most of all, the representatives of the media. Even the gift shop fell into step, carrying no newspapers to ensure that family members would be spared upsetting stories.

Just how the hotel was converted so quickly into a refuge for grieving families was not fully clear. It just happened, officials said vaguely, noting that a Shick razor conference continued even as buses brought relatives to the hotel.

In fact, the logistics reflected a triumph of experience and rapid planning. A volunteer spiritual care counselor for the Red Cross, Michael Murray of Norton, Mass., said the effort grew in part from the Family Aviation Disaster Act of 1996, ensuring that emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual support would be provided for families in such catastrophes.

Murray, a Roman Catholic deacon, said an imam, a rabbi and representatives of Catholic and Protestant groups were leading prayer sessions inside the hotel. Many were trained in clinical pastoral work to prepare for such disasters. Like Murray, many were veterans of other air accidents, including the June 1 crash of an American Airlines plane in Arkansas.

Sitting on a low wall outside the hotel, reading the Koran, Nada Eissa said the Red Cross paid for his plane fare from Canada. Arian said that when EgyptAir balked at flying more than one family member to the United States, an angry call from New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani persuaded the airline to up the number to four free tickets. Grand Circle Tours of Boston --which lost 54 of its older-than-50 travelers in the crash--also provided free air travel for family members.

The setting in the resort community of Newport, not far from the proud mansions where turn-of-the-century robber barons spent their holidays, was chosen for its proximity to the former gymnasium in Quonset Point, R.I., that has been turned into a morgue. Debris from the aircraft will be housed in an adjacent facility.

Officials said a multisectarian service would take place soon. But where such an observance would occur was not clear. Heavy rains and powerful winds arrived in the area late Tuesday, making a trip to the site near Nantucket where the plane crashed unlikely, at least for a while.

For now, Sayed Hussein, for one, said he is happy to be even this close to the spot where his brother’s life ended. He will wait as long as it takes, Hussein said, to find even the smallest fragment of Ismail.

“I am hoping to find something, anything, that will lead me to him,” Hussein said. “Something, anything of him that I can take back home to bury in Egypt.”

* STORM HALTS SEARCH

Bad weather forced a delay in search and recovery operations in the Flight 990 crash. A16

* DELIVERY HALTED

Federal officials order Boeing Co. to stop delivery of aircraft amid safety concerns. C7