Tsunami Victim’s Family to Keep Gloom From Anniversary

Searching for his brother after the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami last year, David Abels grew so frustrated with Web trails that went nowhere and downed phone lines that he hopped a plane from Chicago to Thailand.

He spent nearly two weeks there in early January hunting for his 33-year-old brother, Ben, an avid outdoorsman and world traveler who was vacationing on the island of Phi Phi when a wall of water crashed into his beachside bungalow.

The 36-year-old attorney from the Chicago suburb of Evanston hired two private investigators to help him, joining one of his brother’s friends and a few other Americans he had met. Donning medical masks and rubber gloves, they spent days sifting through victims’ photos and examining corpses at hospitals and makeshift morgues in Buddhist temples.

But David Abels returned home empty-handed nearly two weeks later. It would be six more weeks before the family got word from the U.S. State Department that Ben’s body had been identified through dental records. Only then did he realize how close he had come to finding him.

It turned out Ben Abels’ remains were being stored at the same temple in Krabi, Thailand, where his brother spent several days searching among hundreds of bodies stored in large refrigeration units. He had requested dental records of a few dozen victims after narrowing the list based on height, hair color and other characteristics -- but never asked to see victim No. 548.

“I was literally working within 10 feet of him. We didn’t pull the right person,” Abels said. “It’s frustrating. It wouldn’t have changed anything, but it would have been nice to have avoided the next six weeks of agony.”

When confirmation finally came in early March -- a month after hundreds gathered in Evanston for a memorial -- Abels recognized the photographs e-mailed to him by the State Department. He had seen the same pictures while in Krabi, but he hadn’t recognized his brother.

Ben Abels is buried at a Chicago cemetery, which has brought some peace to the family, Abels said. He says he never would have thought the recovery of remains would take on such meaning.

“My brother was a real outdoorsy guy. I think he would have been OK being washed out to sea, and that would have been the end of it,” Abels said. “But now I guess there’s just somewhere to go think about him.”

Ben Abels’ travel companion, Libby North, was in the bungalow when the tsunami hit and nearly lost a hand. She now lives in Portland, Ore., and is back at work, according to her posting on a website dedicated to Abels.

On Dec. 26, the anniversary, David Abels will be in Florida and his parents in California.

“Ben loved to travel so much. He wouldn’t want us moping around Chicago,” he said. So instead of visiting the grave, “we might lay some flowers on the beach.”