From All Walks of Life, They Shared a Common Fate

Those who died or are unaccounted for at the World Trade Center and Pentagon come from all walks of life, from bond traders and financiers to military commanders and civilian military personnel. Among the thousands of lives presumed lost in Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, only a relative few have been identified. Here are some of their stories:

David Berry

Work and family were David Berry’s two consuming passions.

As research director at the brokerage firm of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Berry kept long hours. To cut down on commuting time, he lived with his wife and three young sons in Brooklyn Heights, across the East River from his World Trade Center office on the 89th floor of the south tower.

“He was quiet. He was very thoughtful,” said colleague Peter Wirth, who described Berry as an “intellectually curious” man unafraid to take difficult positions.

Born and raised in Oklahoma, Berry, 43, attended Yale University and the London School of Economics. People in the office would tease the formal, well-spoken Berry, asking if he was really from Oklahoma.

Berry and his wife, a publishing house editor, had a weekend house in the Hamptons. Wirth often ran into them there and was inevitably startled at the sight of Berry relaxing, wearing casual garb.

Most of Berry’s closest colleagues, those who worked alongside him in the research department, are also missing, Wirth said.

John Iskyan

A friend who called John Iskyan at his office on the 105th floor of World Trade Center’s north tower after the first plane hit the building asked if he was OK. “Yup, we’re evacuating now,” was the 41-year-old’s calm response.

Iskyan, who had worked 16 years for the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald Securities, never made it out.

A native of Manhasset, Long Island, Iskyan and his wife Margaret had two children, Peter, 12, and Carolynn, 9. He also directed the youth lacrosse program in Wilton, Conn., where he lived.

“He was really into his family and his community,” said brother-in-law Robert Keeling.

Iskyan was also fond of skiing, a sport that drew him to Saint Michael’s College in northern Vermont, where he met his wife.

David Rice

Two weeks before the World Trade Center explosion, David Rice, 31, had been on an airplane that nearly crashed. Rice later told family members he felt an incredible calm on that plane, because he knew he had no control over events.

“David told them he’d learned that in tough times, get down on your knees and pray to God,” said the Rev. Joseph Ross, the priest at his family church, Christ the King Catholic Church of Oklahoma City. “His family believes that’s what he did at his desk at the World Trade Center just before he died.”

A native of Oklahoma City, Rice attended the church’s elementary school and then Bishop McGuiness High School. He graduated from Loyola University in Chicago in 1994 with honors, then got a master’s degree in finance from the London School of Economics in 1996. He also studied as a Fulbright Scholar in Africa one semester. He was employed as an investment banker at Sandler O’Neill & Partners, an investment banking firm, with offices on the 104th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center.

“David was very inclusive, and had a really wide circle of friends from all the places where he’d traveled and gone to school,” Ross said.

Recently divorced, Rice is survived by his father, attorney Hugh Rice, his mother, Cindy Rice, who works for the church, and a brother and sister who live in New York.

After the north tower was hit, Rice called his parents and his siblings to tell them he was safe, that he and his colleagues had been told to stay at their desks.

“As tragic as this is, the family considers it a gift that his body was actually located and identified,” Ross said.

Martha Reszke

Martha Reszke’s husband, James, headed to the Pentagon on Tuesday morning after learning it had been hit by a plane, praying the damage had not been in the part of the building where she worked as a civilian budget analyst for the Army.

“But when he got there, he knew immediately; it had gone right through her office,” said the victim’s sister-in-law, Paulette Reszke.

Martha Reszke, 56, of Stafford, Va., began work at the Pentagon about five years ago when James, a career Army master sergeant, was transferred there from Germany. When he retired three years ago, she remained at her job because she enjoyed it so much. She’d held the same job when they were stationed in Germany.

“We are just lost without her,” said her sister-in-law. “You just cannot believe what a special person she was. She’d do anything for anybody.”

Reszke, the mother of two grown children and grandmother of seven, was born in Germany and moved to the U.S. as a teenager. She met her husband when he was stationed near her home in Savannah, Ga. They loved traveling the world and Reszke was known in her town as a superb gardener, her family said.

Her body has not been recovered. Her son-in-law, Fred Brown, a sergeant who serves in the Army on the Pentagon emergency search team, has been carrying blueprints of her office with him, in an attempt to locate her body.

Pat Murphy

Pat Murphy, a lieutenant commander with the U.S. Navy Reserves, is among the missing at the Pentagon.

Murphy, 38, graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1986 with a degree in chemical engineering. He also held master’s degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Murphy served on nuclear submarines in the U.S. Navy, and left with the rank of lieutenant in the early 1990s. He has been a member of the Navy reserves ever since, and was fulfilling the two-week active duty requirement at the Pentagon when it was attacked Tuesday, said Mike Gipson, who was in the ROTC with Murphy in college.

Friends remembered a happy-go-lucky man nicknamed “Murph” who had a great sense of humor and was well read, a tireless worker and a devoted family man.

Gipson and Murphy, who have been friends for nearly two decades, last spoke a few weeks ago.

“We talked about politics, life, sports, the whole bit,” Gipson said. “If the worst is true, he’s going to be missed.”

Murphy, of Berkeley Heights, N.J., is survived by his wife, Masako, and their two young sons.

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Times staff writers Jessica Garrison and Deborah Schoch contributed to this story.