‘I Will Never Stop Looking for Her’

By Thursday, most people had run out of places to look.

Still, they gathered by the thousands at a Manhattan armory to file a missing person report, sweat glistening from their brows as the sun baked down.

Faces were stained from tears, the fatigue of sleepless nights showing through. In the long lines wrapped around the building, hundreds stood with fliers of the missing taped to their shirts.

“Call Mom!!” read one.

“Have you seen Myra Maldonado?” read another. “She is the mother of two boys and is being missed terribly by her children, siblings and nephews.”

After three days, many vowed not to give up.

“I still have great faith,” said Michael Rasweiler, 18, whose father was at work on the 100th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center on Tuesday. “I know my dad is out there somewhere.”

The number tells it all: 4,763 people were missing, most if not all of them likely crushed beneath the tons of debris of the World Trade Center. But with few bodies pulled from the wreckage, there was no finality for thousands of families. And so they kept searching.

Joe Boggio started immediately; as soon as he saw the fire from his offices a few blocks away, he raced to call his girlfriend, Jody Tepedino Nicholo. Not a half hour before, he had walked her to the elevators at the north tower and kissed her goodbye, just like every morning.

As he dialed, he watched the fire and smoke spread. The phone kept ringing, but there was no answer--and no word since.

He sorted through rumors and Internet postings. He and Jody’s brother Vincent Tepedino on Wednesday scoured every hospital on the east side of Manhattan, clutching pictures of Jody. The black-and-white photos showed a 39-year-old woman with curly hair and a mouth stretched into a broad smile. In hospital after hospital--so numerous they blurred in their memories--they scanned patient lists and left fliers.

As they walked long city blocks to west-side hospitals, they got the call they had been praying for. Her name, another of Jody’s brothers said, was on a list of people hospitalized that came from Cantor Fitzgerald, a prestigious investment firm where she worked on the 105th floor as an executive assistant.

For 15 minutes: Joy.

Then came the follow-up call that filled them with dread. It was a mistake. It wasn’t true.

On foot to yet another hospital, Boggio and Vincent Tepedino heard that Jody’s company had opened a command center at the Pierre Hotel to help distraught families. No one there knew anything about Jody.

Cantor Fitzgerald’s top executive said Thursday that none of the company’s 700 employees in the building could be found.

On Thursday, Boggio and Tepedino took the train from Brooklyn again, this time to the armory--a large brick building with the names of America’s bloodiest battles carved into the facade--to fill out the missing-person forms. What was the person’s height, weight, hospital of birth? Any distinguishing marks?

One woman outside, speaking into a cell phone to her friend’s family, sought more precise information. Was the birthmark on the back of her right thigh more of a flesh color or was it pink?

Others phoned doctors and dentists, trying to pin down details of dental work and surgeries.

Nearby, David Mortman, 50, shook his head despairingly. He was searching for the son of friends stranded in Florida. The son, Nicholas Lassman, a 28-year-old Cantor Fitzgerald employee, worked on the 99th floor of one of the World Trade Center towers.

“This form,” said Mortman, grasping the six pages of information he was struggling to fill out. “This is the normal form--so many people are never going to be found. There isn’t anything left to identify.”

Some felt fortunate when they tracked down shreds of information.

Harry Ramos’ family tried to reach every co-worker of the 45-year-old trader with the May Davis Group, calling names from a list the Baltimore-based investment firm gave them.

They knew where he was when the plane struck his building: at his desk on the phone with his wife. He told her something was wrong and that he was going to gather up his group on the 87th floor and evacuate.

His wife waited Tuesday at her home in Newark, N.J., jumping each time the telephone rang.

Some news came Wednesday, but it wasn’t good. A co-worker who made it out last saw Ramos on the 44th floor. They had stopped to help a man suffering chest pains. As the minutes passed, Ramos insisted the co-worker keep going.

“The last he saw Harry, a fireman was screaming at him to move, to get the hell out,” said his brother-in-law Ivan Cruz. “But he said Harry wouldn’t go.”

Still, the family held out hope. Inside the armory, where only those filing missing-person reports were allowed, Cruz said he spoke first to a counselor, then to a police officer who urged him to take as much time as he needed. Cruz shook with emotion as tears streamed from behind his sunglasses. “It has been like a terrible dream,” he said.

Some, particularly the families of emergency response workers, have been unsettled by almost ghost-like sightings of loved ones.

Sharon Cole, 32, got a call from a friend in Canada who insisted she saw on television Cole’s boyfriend, 30-year-old Keith Roy Maynard, helping a woman flee the towers.

But by late Tuesday night, Maynard--a firefighter with Engine Co. 33--was on the long list of missing New York firefighters.

Boggio can’t help but think of the last moment he saw his girlfriend.

As was their ritual, he looked back as he left the concourse of the World Trade Center. She waited for him to turn, then smiled and waved.

“I just keep thinking of the big smile she gave me,” Boggio said. “‘I will never stop looking for her--looking for answers.”

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Americans wait for word, weep and reach out to one another in grief, A41