Blizzard Blamed for Death of a Capitol Favorite

For 21 years, she cheerfully greeted riders on Elevator No. 5 in the Cannon House Office Building. “You look nice today!” Fifine Glaws would tell House members and their aides.

She was a popular fixture on Capitol Hill, a mentally retarded woman with “a voice you would never forget,” said one staff member. “If you stepped on the elevator and she wasn’t there, you would be bummed.”

Glaws, 51, who had legions of friends on the Hill, was found dead in the snow in a Bethesda, Md., alley Tuesday evening, three nights after her brother reported her missing. Glaws, who lived in a Rockville, Md., group home and had been tested recently for Alzheimer’s disease, may have become confused while riding on public transportation Saturday, police said. They said she may have left a bus at the wrong stop and not known where she was as the weather worsened, police said.

As Congress resumed work Wednesday after the snowstorm, news of Glaws’ death spread quickly.

“I’m just so shocked,” said Amy Lorenzini, an aide to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas). “I couldn’t believe it when I read it, because so many of us knew her.”

An autopsy report had not been completed, but Montgomery County, Md., police said they did not suspect foul play.

Glaws’ brother, Peter Glaws, said his sister, who also suffered from schizophrenia, left the Rockville group home about 7 p.m. Saturday and traveled to Capitol Hill, apparently headed to work. Peter Glaws said he thinks his sister was confused and may have thought that it was a weekday.

A U.S. Capitol Police officer told her that she did not have to work because it was a weekend evening. She apparently then began traveling back to Rockville by public transportation, her brother said. Later that night, when he learned that his sister had not returned to the group home in the blizzard, Peter Glaws called police to report her missing.

In 1982, after Glaws’ mother, who was from the Boston area, wrote a letter about her daughter to then-House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip”O’Neill Jr. (D-Massachusetts), he arranged for Glaws to get the elevator job.

Glaws said his sister “faced adversity every day and conquered it every day.... She had much less to deal with in terms of capacity and had a very simplistic approach to life -- that if you were expected to do something, you did it.”