Flight 175

United Flight 175, a Boeing 767 en route to Los Angeles from Boston, hit the south World Trade Center tower with 56 passengers and nine crew members on board.

Alona Abraham

A 30-year-old resident of the Israeli port town of Ashdot, Alona Abraham was 11 days into her first vacation in the United States. Her cousin, Danny Raymond of Van Nuys, had been sending letters to his Israeli relatives for years, extolling the U.S. as exciting--and peaceful.

An office worker, Abraham finally decided to visit, and in the process was hoping to meet a few nice Jewish boys who might make for a good life partner, Raymond said.

“Everything was really exciting to her, to be in a country she had only seen in newspapers and on TV,” Raymond said. “She couldn’t believe how different everything looked--and that it was so peaceful.”

Abraham’s family were Bombay Jews who emigrated to Israel in the 1950s. Raymond said Alona was “all Indian” in appearance--tall, with stunning black eyes and brown hair, a woman who found joy in being with friends and family--”just the warmth, the heart, the goodness of being with someone,” he said.

Touri Bolourchi

Touri Bolourchi, a 69-year-old retired nurse born in Tehran and educated in England, moved to the United States with her daughters in 1979, right after the Islamic revolution.

Her husband, Akbar Bolourchi, followed two years later, moving his internal medicine practice to Beverly Hills from Tehran. The two met when she was head nurse at Women’s Hospital in Tehran and he was a practicing physician there.

Besides being an accomplished nurse, she spoke six languages: Turkish, English, French, Italian, Arabic and Farsi.

Touri Bolourchi boarded the flight in Boston after a two-week visit with a daughter, Roya Turan, and two grandsons. “She said, ‘I’ll see you when you come to L.A,’ ” Turan said. “She had that beautiful expression on her face, with her beautiful smile.”

She hadn’t flown to Boston for two years. “She was so afraid of airplanes,” her husband said. Years ago, he explained, two of her cousins died in commercial airline crashes in Europe and Africa.

She is survived by her husband, her daughters Neda Bolourchi and Roya Turan, and grandsons Bobby Turan, 15, and Kayvon Turan, 10, of Boston.

Daniel Brandhorst, David Brandhorst and Ronald Gamboa

Daniel Brandhorst, 42, lived in a home perched on the lip of a canyon in the Hollywood Hills with his partner Ronald Gamboa and their adopted 3-year-old son. They were returning from a vacation in Boston and Cape Cod.

The couple had been together for 14 years. Brandhorst was the serious one, the lawyer and accountant, the man who dreamed of becoming a professor. Gamboa, 33, was the happy-go-lucky one, the beloved manager of a Gap store in Santa Monica, the family man with a glint of mischievousness in his eye and an ever-ready arsenal of jokes.

If Gamboa’s sister or friend said “Isn’t that cute” about a puppy or “Isn’t that beautiful” about a sunset, Gamboa would retort: “What am I?”

Both had moved from small towns--Brandhorst from Liverpool, N.Y., Gamboa from Anchorage, Ky.--to New York City, where they met. They moved to Los Angeles a few years later when Brandhorst was transferred to another office of his company, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

They loved to travel around the world, hang out with a close group of friends and visit family. They lavished attention on the blue-eyed 3-year-old they adopted as an infant and named after Daniel’s brother David.

John ‘Jay’ Corcoran

A marine engineer, John ‘Jay’ Corcoran, 45, was en route from his home in Norwell, Mass., to sail out of the Port of Los Angeles on a container ship, officials with his union, the Marine Engineers Beneficial Assn. said.

Union official Al Camelio of Long Beach said Corcoran, a Boston-area native, graduated from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in 1979 and had worked on oceangoing cargo ships ever since. In recent years, Corcoran handled a rigorous schedule of 84 days at sea, then 84 days at home with his wife, Diana, and their children, Megan, 17, and Jake, 14.

“He was a regular guy with a good sense of humor, always smiling, and he was liked by the people he worked for and the people who worked for him,” Camelio said.

Camelio said Corcoran’s ship, the APL Thailand, was to sail today for Asia.

“He used to love to tell me what his family has been doing while he was home,” Camelio said. “It’s a cliche to say he was a family man, but he really was. I think that’s how he’d like to be remembered.”

Dorothy A. Dearaujo

In the tidy, tightknit Long Beach seaside neighborhood of Naples, Dorothy A. Dearaujo was known as “our artist” because she captured the area’s canals, boats, shops and homes in detailed, flashy water colors.

Dearaujo, a cheery, independent 82-year-old woman who had lived alone for more than 20 years, was a frequent traveler to places famous for their scenery and museums: France, Australia, Italy, Brazil and Hawaii.

Dearaujo was 69 when she earned a bachelor’s degree in art at Cal State Long Beach. About a month ago, she went to Bedford, Mass., to visit her son, Tim, said her next door neighbors, Earl and Karen Anderson.

“I was looking forward to her return,” said Karen Anderson, a geology instructor at Cal State Long Beach. “She was going to finish a painting of our home by adding some flowers.”

Lisa Frost

Lisa Frost was flying home to see her parents after wrapping up a summer job and graduating in May from Boston University at the top of her class.

Frost, 22, planned to stay with her family in the south Orange County town of Rancho Santa Margarita for a few days before heading north to find a job in the Bay Area. She had just wrapped up a summer job at a Boston-based food magazine and hoped to work in the wine industry or enroll at a local college and continue her studies.

Her last day at the magazine was Friday. The staff took her to breakfast and discussed the possibility that Frost launch a San Francisco edition of the magazine, Where To Eat.

“She was just starting her life,” said Tom Frost, her father.

She had called her dad right before boarding the plane. “I told her I loved her,” Tom Frost said. “She told me she loved me too. ‘OK, see you there Dad.’ ”

She is survived by her father and her mother, Melanie, and her 18-year-old brother, Daniel.

Sue Kim Hanson, Peter Hanson, Christine Hanson

Sue Kim Hanson, 35, her husband, Peter, 32, and their only child, 2-year-old Christine, were traveling to California to visit relatives in North Hollywood.

Relatives said Sue Kim Hanson, a genealogist, was overjoyed about visiting Southern California for the first time in four years. Though born in Pasadena, she spent her early childhood in Korea before returning to Los Angeles.

When Hanson’s cousin Frency Cho spoke with her Sunday night, she asked if she craved any special food for her visit. “She said, ‘Everything Korean. Everything.’ ”

Her husband was vice president of a computer company and the family lived in Groton, Mass.

Hanson’s brothers and cousins all gathered late Tuesday in North Hollywood to break the news to her 83-year-old grandmother, Ok Kim. The grandmother had raised Sue Kim Hanson after her parents had died of cancer.

“She couldn’t believe it,” Cho said. “Today it’s more of a reality to her. She is crying and crying all day.”

Maclovio ‘Joe’ Lopez Jr.

Maclovio ‘Joe’ Lopez Jr., 41, a burley construction worker, was on temporary assignment in Boston, employed by a company that specializes in laying pipeline on water main projects.

He was excited about coming home to Norwalk to see his wife and two adult children.

“He was a big strong man, but cried at my graduation,” said daughter Dannette Lopez. “He was made of steel and chewed nails and this is the only way they could take him out. I know he didn’t sit still on that plane.”

Growing up in Pueblo, Colo., Lopez worked various jobs before becoming a construction worker. He married his sweetheart 22 years ago and moved to Los Angeles. From here, he has traveled extensively over the years to build pipelines in cities around the nation.

He is survived by his wife, Rhonda, his daughter Dannette, 21, his son Joseph, 18, and his mother, father and six siblings.

Ruth Clifford McCourt and Juliana McCourt

Ron Clifford was working at the World Trade Center towers when a plane carrying his sister, Ruth Clifford McCourt, and 4-year-old niece, Juliana, slammed into one of the towers.

“Tragically, my sister hit the tower building as my brother was on the ground floor. He’s safe now. He’s very traumatized,” John Clifford told the Manchester Guardian.

Adding to this bizarre coincidence, one of McCourt’s friends, Paige Farley-Hackel of Boston, was on the American Airlines flight that slammed into the other tower. They had planned to meet in Los Angeles. McCourt was coming out to see old friends. “Our daughters were going to play together,” said Mimi Torp, McCourt’s best friend in high school. “We of course wanted our daughters to be friends, as we were.”

McCourt, who was born in Ireland, lived in Pacific Palisades with her family and attended Marymount High School while her stepfather worked as a professor at UCLA.

Under her maiden name, Ruth created Clifford Classique, a full service salon and beauty product line based in Boston. She married David McCourt and the family lived in New London, Conn.

Ruth McCourt is survived by her husband, David, and her mother, Paula Scott, and brothers Ron and John.

James M. Roux

An attorney, James M. Roux was preparing to move from Portland, Maine, to Northern California to work for his brother David, the co-founder of a Silicon Valley investment firm.

“Jimmy Roux was my best friend growing up, and he’s an interesting guy,” said David Davis, a West Los Angeles man who had known Roux since they attended third grade in 1967 in Lewiston, Maine.

An avid trekker, Roux, 42, was so fond of Nepal that he established an office in Katmandu with a Nepalese partner. Roux had recently begun to represent Sherpa guides, hoping to raise their profiles by finding roles for them in Asian advertising.

Roux’s uncle, the late James Longley, was an independent who served as the governor of Maine in the 1970s.

Roux is survived by two sons, several siblings and his mother, who lives in Maine.

Timothy ‘Tim’ Ward

Tim Ward, 38, was an executive at Rubio’s, the Carlsbad-based restaurant chain that made fish tacos a popular fast food throughout Southern California. Ward started with the company 14 years ago, when it consisted of three modest restaurants selling a new thing called fish tacos. He stayed with the company as it grew into a publicly traded chain.

Born in Modesto, he moved to San Diego when he was in high school and graduated from San Diego State. He still lived in San Diego, according to a spokeswoman for his mother, Suzie Ward Baker. An enthusiastic theater-goer, he was a season ticket holder at the Old Globe Theater in the city’s Balboa Park. His mother lives in La Mesa and his father, Ray, lives in Visalia.

According to the spokeswoman, Ward had accompanied his girlfriend, Linda Brewton, who works for Cisco Systems in Northern California, to Boston, where she was attending a business meeting. His girlfriend took him to the airport Tuesday and watched him board his flight to Los Angeles. From there, he had planned to fly home to San Diego.