A Fiance’s Panicked Search at the Scene

Jose Funes, an Altadena deliveryman who works nights, awoke early Wednesday afternoon to a phone call from his fiancee, Julie Sundt.

A landscape designer, she had a business meeting on the Westside and was going to pass the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market on her way home. The couple had just visited the farmers market Saturday, and Sundt, a fan of the peaches and apricots, asked her husband-to-be Wednesday: You want something to eat?

“It’s up to you,” Funes recalled saying.

Sundt, 42, is usually punctual, and when she didn’t arrive home by 2 p.m., Funes began to worry. Turning on the TV, he saw that a car had torn through the farmers market.

He tried Sundt’s cell phone, then her office. Nothing. Panicked, he jumped into his car and reached Santa Monica within half an hour.

Sundt is 5-foot-6, blond and blue-eyed. He didn’t see her anywhere. They’d met 18 months ago at a Kinko’s.

“We hadn’t set a date -- we’d been talking about this year,” Funes, 35, said of their wedding. He scanned a crowd gathered behind a police barricade on the promenade. “I couldn’t stay home.”

With his Panama hat to protect him from a rain shower, Funes began his search a few minutes before 3 p.m. on the south side of Arizona Avenue, approaching police who stood between crowds and the tarps that covered bodies of the dead. The officers replied that the injured had already been taken away by ambulance.

Funes was among dozens of relatives and friends who searched for loved ones among victims at the market. Many of the searchers were recognizable by their dialing of cell phones, calling again and again to people who would not answer.

Their thumbs throbbed from the dialing, and their hands and feet turned clumsy from the panic. Funes, who let a reporter accompany him, slipped and fell as he passed through a parking garage to get around police lines. At one point, he dropped his wallet, its contents falling into a puddle in a 4th Street gutter.

Every few minutes, he tried Sundt again on his cell phone. No answer.

“I don’t know where else to look,” he said plaintively.

By 3:15 p.m., he had begun to add hospitals to his frantic calls.

At 3:30 p.m., he left the scene and began to walk around the nearby area, looking desperately for Sundt’s black Volvo. By the calculations of such a moment, it was good news that he couldn’t find it in any of the parking places she favors on trips to the farmers market.

By 4, there was still no Volvo and no Sundt. He dialed the Santa Monica police and fire departments and eventually got a Red Cross number for families of victims. But the operators there still hadn’t seen a list.

“Why are they taking so long?” he asked.

With each person he called, he left cell and home numbers. No one called back.

Still looking for answers, he returned to the command center at 4th and Arizona. Fire officials there, however, couldn’t offer any more help or information. Funes stood at the intersection, watching a mass of reporters gather for a news conference.

At 4:27, his cell phone rang for the first time.

It was Sundt. She had never reached the market. On her way, a client had called and her day had gotten scrambled.

“Honey, I’ve been so worried about you,” Funes said, color returning to his face.