From the Chicago Tribune

Search continues as services are planned
With hope fading, fliers identifying the missing are now memorials
By Evan Osnos, Tribune national correspondent. Tribune staff reporter Dan Mihalopoulos contributed to this report

Published September 20 2001

NEW YORK -- Even as it clings to the language of hope, this city is adopting the gestures of mourning.

Seven days since any survivors were pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Wednesday that the "rescue effort" continues. At the same time, he announced plans for a prayer service at Yankee Stadium this weekend.

The city's official stance still leaves room, albeit very little, for a miracle, but few New Yorkers expect one. It is clear in the changing words of wounded families, the lines of relatives offering DNA samples to identify bodies, and, most vividly, in the emerging monuments to the lost.

Fliers paper walls

Thousands of weather-worn fliers with the faces of the missing, once hopeful efforts to unite the wounded with desperate families, are becoming the first memorials to the tragedy. Bearing photos, descriptions, and phone numbers, they paper the walls and fences of entire city blocks in row upon row of victims.

At the most densely covered areas near hospitals and family aid centers, New Yorkers stop and stare, day and night. They slowly move from name to name, like visitors to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, scanning a gallery of faces as diverse as those who worked in the twin towers.

The fliers are illuminated at night by candles left, and relit, anonymously.

Individually, the careful choice of words and photos tell thousands of tales. Detailed and unvarnished, the fliers describe not only the lives cut short on Sept. 11, but also the families left behind.

Andrew Bailey has "Veronica tattooed on his chest."

Six-year-old Mya Braker has a "bracelet w/ her name and a medical bracelet (penicillin)."

Emergency medical technician David Sullivan is "wearing a white gold wedding band."

Bankers, electricians, executives, children, doctors and waitresses.

They are frozen at a point in time: children visiting parents at work, a carpenter's apprentice on a practice job, a sightseer on vacation.

They appear in passport photos, graduation portraits, golf scenes, military identification cards, green cards and cut-out family portraits.

Some descriptions on the fliers are utilitarian.

Sara Manley has a "faint, 1-inch scar on her right cheek, wears a silver Swiss Army watch on her left wrist and is wearing both an engagement and a wedding ring."

Others use the style of newspaper obituaries.

"Loving husband, loving father of two sons, loving son, loving brother, loving uncle, cousin, nephew, neighbor, friend and dedicated firefighter," wrote the relatives of fire department Lt. Anthony Jovic.

A proud family

Like many, the family of 26-year-old firefighter and U.S. Marine Sean Tallon assembled a flier in the first frenzied moments on Sept. 11 after learning of his disappearance.

While their mother searched for a photo of Tallon in his formal uniform, Tallon's sister, Rosaleen DeRos, grabbed a red felt-tip pen. On the flier, she wrote the first thing that came to her: "Sean we are proud of you!"

"All I could think about was that I never told him that enough," DeRos said in a telephone interview from her home in Yonkers, N.Y. "You never tell people things like that until they are gone."

In another suburban town, 19-year-old Neel Jerath sat down at the family computer. He chose a tone, he said, that would have pleased his missing father, an engineer with a fondness for efficiency.

"Dear Sir/Madam,

"We request you to kindly locate Mr. Prem N. Jerath of East Indian heritage."

Neel's mother signed the notice: "Regards, Meena Jerath, Wife."

"If my father taught me one thing it is to be straightforward and logical, to use a process," the younger Jerath said. "That's what I did."

New fliers rare

As the chance of finding more survivors dimmed, the appearance of new fliers waned. So too have crowds of searching relatives who so recently had swarmed to family assistance centers.

Even the forlorn few at the city's main assistance center on Wednesday acknowledged a somber reality.

"I think he's gone. I think they're all gone," said Robert Tirado, who had held out hope for almost a week that his nephew, firefighter Hector Tirado, would be found alive.

Although his words grow grimmer by the day, Giuliani is not yet ready to give up hope.

In canceling a large memorial service planned for Sunday in Central Park, he said: "It was too early to have a memorial service--too early in the recovery and relief effort."

Officials also feared that large crowds expected for the Central Park event would have taxed the already strained police force, the mayor said. Earlier in the day, he had taken French President Jacques Chirac on a tour of the disaster site, from the air.

Prayer service planned

Tickets for a smaller prayer service, set for Sunday at the stadium, will be offered first to families of the missing.

With relatively few spaces available to the general public for that event, New Yorkers no doubt will find their own memorials.

Joey Quinones found his among the hundreds of fliers papering a wall near his East Side office.

"You see `5,000 dead' on TV," said Quinones, 35. "But you don't have any sense of the loss until you come see all the faces."

One of three dozen people moving slowly along the wall in fading afternoon light, Quinones stopped at an 8-by-10-inch blue flier for Roland Pacheco.

"Please find my daddy!" it read, over a photo of a young father, cheek-to-cheek with a giggling infant son.

"That beautiful baby and his father," Quinones said softly.

Copyright © 2001, The Chicago Tribune