‘I Know This Is What She Would Like’

A week after the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, workers still are sorting through the rubble and trying to identify the dead.

Daniel McNeal’s body was among the early ones found and identified, allowing his family to bury him today in Maryland.

Debbie Ramsaur’s family still waits. While the hunt in Arlington, Va., for bodies at the Pentagon continues, they are left with a question never asked while Ramsaur was alive: Where would she want to be buried?

As recovery efforts continue at the crash sites, here are some of the victims’ stories.

Debbie Ramsaur

John Ramsaur is delaying the inevitable: planning his wife’s funeral. He hopes her body will be found, and that she can be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

“We never talked about what to do if anything ever happened to either one of us, but I know this is what she would like,” he said.

Debbie Ramsaur, 45, of Annandale, Va., worked the last two years as a civilian secretary for the Pentagon’s Office of Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. A mother of two children ages 7 and 5, she worked most of the earlier 12 years for the U.S. military in Germany, where the family lived, her husband said.

When Ramsaur heard about the attack on the Pentagon, he tried to reach his wife by cell phone but couldn’t get through.

“When I learned where the plane had hit, I knew it was hopeless,” said Ramsaur, who works in telecommunications. “It went right directly to her office. She wouldn’t have had a chance to survive it.”

Debbie Ramsaur also leaves a mother and two brothers in Rochester, N.Y., her hometown.

“She’s always worked hard at everything she did,” he said. “She had her children late in life, but they were the best thing to ever happen to her; to both of us.”

Andrew Desperito

The last time Andrew Desperito, 43, was summoned to rescue victims of a terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993, he suffered from smoke inhalation but otherwise emerged unscathed.

Last week, as the New York City firefighter escorted a woman to safety from the north tower, he was buried under crumbling rubble.

“Your father died a hero,” Laura Desperito told the couple’s three children, Nicole, 13, Anthony, 10, and David, 6.

Desperito joined the New York Police Department in 1984, and transferred to the city’s fire department in 1987. His wife finds comfort in knowing that he gave his life helping others, and that the woman he was aiding at the time survived.

“It was so typical of him,” Laura Desperito said.

Like many firefighters, there was more to Desperito’s life than the fire hall.

Desperito, of East Patchogue, Long Island, believed it was a father’s duty to coach his children’s soccer teams, even though he had never played.

So he attended coaching seminars and clinics, studied the game on television, and in his own quiet way led Anthony’s team to a league victory.

“He never yelled at the kids on the sidelines when they were playing,” Laura Desperito said. “He’d see all these other coaches going nuts, and he’d just be quiet. He was never negative about anything.”

In addition to his wife and children, Desperito is survived by his parents, Adele and Anthony Desperito, and a sister, Diane Laveglia, of Greenpoint, N.Y.

Peter J. Ganci

Like Desperito, one of his firefighters, New York City Fire Department Chief Peter J. Ganci died trying to help others.

Ganci, 54, was working to rescue victims of the first tower collapse when the second tower crumbled, burying him and other high-level city fire officials.

Friends described the Farmingdale, Long Island, native as a loyal comrade with a dearth of pretense and a love of practical jokes.

For one, there was the time in the 1960s when Ganci “borrowed” a friend’s horse in Farmingdale and took it to a town carnival. Unable to coax the horse into the back of his convertible, he led the animal down Farmingdale’s busiest street.

As Ganci rose through the ranks from Farmingdale volunteer to New York City firefighter to chief, certain things remained consistent, said Skip Schumeyer, a retired city firefighter who first met Ganci when Schumeyer was 10 years old and Ganci was his 18-year-old idol on the volunteer Farmingdale force.

Ganci was devoted to his wife and three children, one of whom also became a New York City firefighter. He was always the last to leave a party. And, Schumeyer said, was always ready to help others.

Two weeks ago, Ganci and his daughter took part in a canoe race to raise money to help pay the medical bills of a local firefighter’s daughter.

Ganci lost the race, but he long ago won the hearts of his community.

“He had a chest full of medals,” Schumeyer said. “But he never forgot his roots here.”

Daniel McNeal

Daniel McNeal, 29, was to walk his sister Kathleen, 27, down the aisle at her wedding Sept. 29. Instead, he’s being buried today, after services at the Church of the Nativity in Timonium, Md.

McNeal was an analyst at Sandler O’Neill & Partners, one of 67 investment bank employees trapped in the World Trade Center’s south tower.

After the first plane hit the north tower, McNeal called his mother, Kitty, in Towson, Md., from his 104th-floor office and left a message on the answering machine: “The crash was over in Tower One. I’m going to get the heck out of Dodge in a few minutes.”

Then McNeal called his father, Michael, dying of lung cancer at a hospice, and told him not to worry.

“As soon as his father hung up the phone, he [saw] the plane hit the second tower” on the news, cousin Stacy Danko said. “It’s horrible.”

McNeal graduated from Boston College in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in finance, and earned a master’s in business administration from Georgetown University in 1996. He started his job at Sandler O’Neill less than a year ago.

As the search for more bodies continues, Danko said, the family counts itself lucky that its own ordeal has ended.

“The thing that’s given us the most comfort,” she said, “was that they sent us his body.”

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Times staff writers Jerry Hicks and Seema Mehta contributed to this story.