Facing The End

The Fight for Flight 93

“I know we’re all going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it.” That’s what Tom Burnett told his wife Deena. Burnett was one of 38 passengers and seven crew members aboard hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, and he was not the only person to relay information to a loved one. In first-class seat 4D, public relations executive Mark Bingham used an airplane phone to call his mother. “Mom, this is Mark Bingham,” he said, so rattled that he included his last name. “Three guys have taken over the plane, and they say they have a bomb.” Back in coach, Jeremy Glick phoned his wife Lyzbeth to say, “Three Arab-looking men with red headbands” had taken over the cockpit.

Flight 93 was the last of the hijacked planes to meet its fate. All three passengers knew about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Did they do what we think they did? Did three strangers on a flight in distress band together to fight their captors and ditch the Boeing 757 before it could harm untold thousands?

Investigators have recovered Flight 93’s black boxes, and they may tell us something definitive. But those closest to Burnett, Bingham and Glick say they don’t need confirmation. “You’d have to know Mark,” says Bingham’s aunt Kathy Hoglan. “I’m sure he and the others did something to stop this.” “He knew that stopping them was going to end all of their lives,” says Jeremy Glick’s brother-in-law Douglas Hurwitt. “But that was my brother-in-law. He was a take-charge guy.” Deena Burnett says, “I know without a doubt that the plane was bound for some landmark and that they saved many, many more lives than were lost on that plane.”

Other relatives of people on Flight 93 have spoken up too and assigned their loved ones a heroic narrative. Those of the captain, Jason Dahl, say he would never have allowed hijackers to take control of his plane without a fight. But there is something about the similarities of these three passengers that makes the portrait of them as confederates perfectly imaginable. All three were large, athletic, decisive types. Bingham, 6 ft. 5 in., played rugby when at the University of California, Berkeley, and still played for the San Francisco Fog, a gay amateur team. Glick, 6 ft. 4 in., was a national collegiate judo champion, according to the website of the software firm for which he was a sales manager. Burnett, 6 ft. 1 in., was a former high school football player and an executive of a medical-devices firm. All three were nimble, successful, charismatic, self-elected leaders–the kind that have a knack for finding one another.

We’d like to think they did it. We may never know. Yet Glick’s last words to his wife Lyzbeth, like Burnett’s vow of action to his wife, make us want to believe they prevailed, taking Flight 93 down in a Pennsylvania coalfield far from any metropolis. “We’re going to rush the hijackers,” said Glick. Then he put down the phone. –By Josh Tyrangiel

Among the Clouds

Roko Camaj owned the most enviable views in New York City. As a window cleaner for the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, his work space offered staggering panoramas of the city he adopted when he arrived from Montenegro in 1969. Most days, he surveyed the surroundings from indoors, operating a remote cleaning machine from the rooftop; but the windows on the 107th floor could not accommodate the machine, and he would attend to them manually, suspended from a harness. Camaj, 60, was on the observation deck on the 107th floor in 1993 when a bomb hit the building. It took him 2 1/2 hours to descend by stair, his mouth covered with one of his damp sponges, his doffed shirt covering the mouth of a pregnant woman he escorted down. He was back at work the next day. “He said working that high up took some getting used to at first, but he found it peaceful, his escape,” says his son Vincent, one of Camaj’s three children. On days off, Camaj, a Roman Catholic Albanian, also liked to keep things clean and orderly around the house, mowing the grass, renovating the kitchen and, above all, spending time with his family, from whom he originally hid the nature of his risky job. When he started work at the World Trade Center in 1973, he told his wife he worked inside. He called her at 9:14 a.m. last Tuesday from the 105th floor of the south tower. “He told my mom he was with about 200 other people, and he was just waiting for the O.K. to head down,” says Vincent. “He told her not to worry, we’re all in God’s hands.” –By Michele Orecklin

Hell’s Kitchen’s Angels

The stack became a heap, then a small mountain. By Thursday night, the 4-ft. mound of tributes to the fire fighters of Engine 54/Ladder 4 in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen–food donations, flowers, cards, American flags and photos of the station’s fire fighters missing at the World Trade Center site–had grown so big that a second pile of flowers had to be started alongside the entrance. Captain Richard Parenty found the tributes so gratifying they were almost painful: “It’s so good to feel appreciated, and it’s draining. Even the outpouring of support is draining emotionally.”

Engine 54 sent 15 men to the first report of trouble Tuesday morning. None came back. The 45 fire fighters left behind spent an exhausting week consoling their colleagues’ loved ones, digging through the wreckage, hopeful and fearful of finding their brethren. “I don’t have words,” says 12-year veteran Tom Hogan. “We have no information for the families of our guys. I just consider them missing. Hopefully there’ll be a few more miracles today.” When their 24-hr. shifts end, they return to the site on their own time. “It’s not a 9-to-5 thing,” says Parenty. “I’ll be going home, there’s time for that. But this is kind of important now.” Tuesday was Michael Drennan’s first day on the job as a fire fighter-in-training. “One of the guys, Mike Brennan, we joked ’cause our names were similar, he showed me around the house,” says Drennan. “He’s missing now. It’s some way to start off my career.”

For the myriad small villages that make up the city, the local firehouse is not just a protector but a nerve center, a town square and a hearth. JoAnn McCluskey, whose husband was with Engine 54 before his death five years ago, says, “This place was like a family. We did Christmas parties and picnics. One guy used to get on top of the building across the street and get in the cherry picker on the fire truck and be Santa.” Even, or especially, for neighbors who didn’t have a personal connection to the fire fighters or the victims, the station provides an emotional focus. Tamar Kaman, a cosmetics marketer who lives three blocks away, cried as she added flowers to the pile. “This is as close as I’ve gotten to some of the victims,” she said. “Whether or not I can identify all the faces, I feel connected to the grief somehow.” This is what a firehouse does in a time of disaster. First it puts out flames. And then it generates warmth. –By James Poniewozik. Reported by Harriet Barovick

In a Dark Time, Light

In Manhattan, where “good” is just the name of a restaurant in Greenwich Village and “evil” is what we call the prices at the new Chanel store in SoHo, the concept of miracles seemed a little hokey until last week. A pointy-head at one of the city’s universities might have said the idea of the miraculous is an old metaphor that needs demystifying.

But there’s nothing metaphorical about what happened to Genelle Guzman, 31, an office manager who worked on the 64th floor of Tower 1. She called her boyfriend, Roger McMillan, just after the blast and told him she was waiting at her desk, as instructed over the loudspeaker. McMillan, 38, a pressman for a direct-mail company, could see the explosions from his workplace, and told her to get out and meet him in front of Century 21, a discount fashion emporium across from the Trade Center.

He ran and walked 20 blocks, past bloody survivors and jet parts, until he saw the street in front of the store. It was a mountain of detritus. He searched in vain, then called his voice mail. Guzman had left a message saying once again she was staying put, as instructed. “I lost all hope when I heard that,” he says.

What he didn’t know was that Guzman had started down the stairs when word came to evacuate. At floor 13, the building collapsed, and Guzman’s head was caught between two pillars. She lay in fear and agony for hours. She felt a man trapped near her and pushed next to him for comfort. She heard him cry out twice; eventually, he fell silent. She repeatedly asked God, “Please give me a second chance at life.” There was only darkness and dust. So she said another prayer: “Please just give me this one miracle.” And a man appeared above her, a saint named Paul, who lifted her from the rubble. Twenty-six hours had passed.

Now at Bellevue Hospital, Guzman is one of just five victims rescued from the Trade Center after Tuesday. Her head is swollen, and her legs required surgery, but doctors expect full recovery. Guzman and McMillan, Trinidadian immigrants who live in Brooklyn, plan many changes. “Before, we went to church on a couple of occasions,” says McMillan. “It’s something you put off. But Genelle already stated in the hospital bed that this is her calling to God.” The two plan to marry.

As McMillan was racing downtown, Michelle March, 29, an emergency medical technician, was heading into Manhattan in her ambulance. She was among the first EMTs to arrive in front of the south tower. Then hell descended, and March ran. “I noticed that the debris was picking people up and slamming them into buildings. So I grabbed a pole and held on for dear life,” even as the oddments of a skyscraper struck her. “I told God, ‘I’m not dying today,’ so I held on no matter how many bricks were hitting me. I felt ash go down my throat, so I made myself vomit because it was asphyxiating. My head was hurting from the hits, but I refused to lose consciousness.” And she did not. She spent only one night in the hospital. One of the other EMTs with whom she worked died; another is missing.

There were smaller but no less precious miracles. Nishikant Kapatker, a city planner for the Port Authority, went in at 8:30 a.m., a half-hour early because he and his wife Jaya, who worked in the nearby American Express Building, expected to go on vacation that evening. Thrown from his chair by the impact of Flight 11, he quickly made his way downstairs, watching 20 or 30 fire fighters climbing up, huffing and puffing toward death.

Once outside, he saw the body parts on the plaza, the war zone. He went looking for his wife. Both the building where she worked and the one where they live had been evacuated. It was almost 11 a.m. when he finally saw her. “She was sitting on a bench all alone, her head down,” he says. She was praying and meditating. Nishikant put his hand on Jaya’s shoulder. “And she cried like a baby for a long time.” A miracle is worth at least that many tears. –By John Cloud. With reporting by Unmesh Kher and Desa Philadelphia

A Hovering Spirit

For a few brief moments on Tuesday morning, Irish architect Ronnie Clifford, 47, was twice blessed: as both hero and survivor of the terrorist attacks. Standing in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel after the first plane hit, Clifford saw a charred woman rise from the pyre, her fingernails melting off and her clothes burned onto her skin. He was shielding her with his coat when a second shudder sent them to the floor. To keep her from drifting off, they conversed and prayed. She told him her name, Jennieann Maffeo, and the name and number of her boss at Paine Webber; she also told him she was asthmatic and allergic to latex. Clifford took copious notes. With the help of a Marriott employee and oxygen from the hotel’s medical kit, Clifford led her to the nearest ambulance. Maffeo’s charred skin still clinging to his coat, Clifford ran west and hopped on a ferry back to his home in Glen Ridge, N.J., where he hugged his wife and daughter, who was celebrating her 11th birthday on Sept. 11.

Only then did he learn he was also thrice cursed. He had lost family members: Clifford’s sister, Ruth McCourt, 45, and his niece Juliana, 4, had been aboard the United Airlines flight that plowed through 2 World Trade Center. He had also lost a family friend: Paige Farley Hackel, 46, who was meeting McCourt in Los Angeles but traveling separately on the American Airlines flight that crashed into the other tower. Hackel, a spiritual counselor, was heading to Los Angeles for a seminar with Deepak Chopra. McCourt was taking her daughter on a surprise trip to Disneyland.

In the midst of his own grief, Clifford found the number of Maffeo’s boss and called to say she was alive but in very bad shape. Her boss then contacted the family, who eventually found her in critical condition at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, burned over so much of her body that the doctors required the family to put on scrubs before seeing her. When they were finally reunited, Maffeo insisted that they track down the man who saved her.

Consoling his brother-in-law in Connecticut and his family back in Ireland, Clifford received a phone call from Maffeo’s sister. Clifford told her about his own losses in the crash. The sister gave Clifford the family’s thanks for putting himself at risk to be her sister’s savior. Clifford replied that she had it wrong–he never would have made it out of the building before it collapsed if he had not picked up her sister. “The truth is, she saved my life, she gave me strength,” says Clifford. He also believes his sister Ruth’s hovering spirit pointed his way out of the carnage. –By Jodie Morse. Reported by Alice Park

The Last Phone Call

High in the air, from inside the planes and skyscrapers where their final moments slipped away, dozens of victims spoke their last words to faraway people closest to their hearts. Some updated their mothers on developments, like seasoned correspondents calling in reports. A few asked husbands for advice, making vague, impossible requests. But almost all the calls, in the end, turned into love letters.

“Hey, Jules. It’s Brian. I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked. It doesn’t look good. I just want to tell you how much I love you.” As United Flight 175 hurtled toward Manhattan, Brian Sweeney, 38, managed to tick off all the important points for his wife Julie in a message on their Cape Cod, Mass., answering machine. “I hope that I call you again. But if not, I want you to have fun. I want you to live your life. I know I’ll see you someday.” Eight minutes later, after Sweeney made the extemporaneous speech of his life, his plane crashed into the World Trade Center’s south tower.

In the age of television, Americans were treated to graphic scenes of soldiers dying. In the age of mobile phones, we can now say goodbye to the casualties before they die. It is a haunting privilege, a glimpse into the mind-set of the doomed. Just like the images, the voices tell us more and less than we want to know.

Julie Sweeney has listened to her husband’s message only once. She is trying to resist playing it over and over. “I want to keep listening to it, I want to hear his voice, but I don’t know if that’s a healthy thing to do.” She is glad he called, because “hearing his calm voice, hearing his love for me, was helpful.” But it also saddened her, she says, making her feel like a witness to her husband’s murder.

The voices do not comfort us with the illusion that these victims died instantly, ignorant of their fate. Quite the contrary. They give us a script to run through in our minds. The victims moved past denial into acceptance at breakneck speed, which meant they understood clearly–more clearly than we–what was happening. Perhaps that’s why the hijackers, as some reports have suggested, urged some passengers to call home–quite aware that the drama would inflame our despair.

But it can inspire us as well. In the face of overwhelming fear, most of these people grew calm. They reshuffled their priorities instantly. The terror did not leave them hysterical; it left them lonely, searching to connect with the people who knew them best. And it offered them a fleeting chance to ease the grief to come. Another passenger on Sweeney’s plane, Peter Hanson, 32, flying with his wife and small daughter, called his parents just before impact. “I think we’re going down, but don’t worry. It’s going to be quick.” From United Flight 93, flight attendant CeeCee Lyles and passenger Lauren Grandcolas called their husbands before crashing outside Pittsburgh. “We have been hijacked,” said Grandcolas. “They are being kind. I love you.”

Of course, there were other calls that came prematurely, at the peak of panic. From the 92nd floor of the south tower, Steve Cafiero called his mother. He described seeing a plane jutting out of the neighboring tower and people falling to the ground. He sounded calm. But suddenly he started screaming. He dropped the phone. His mother Grace Kneski held the line for half an hour, hoping he’d come back. He never did. Now she assumes her son was screaming at the sight of a plane heading toward his window. Despite that horror, she insists she is glad they spoke. “I can hear his voice from now on, forever,” she says. “It’s embedded in my brain.” –By Amanda Ripley

They Knew the Odds

Bravery is the first thing we think of in fire fighters. But New York City’s fire chief of special operations, Ray Downey, is hailed by his peers as the smartest fire fighter on a force full of smart fire fighters. Few men can enter a burning building and see order. Downey can. Few men can walk through the wake of chaos, be it a hurricane’s wrath or a terrorist’s bomb, and know how to organize and proceed. Downey can.

We use the present tense not out of foolish optimism but out of respect. Fire fighters aren’t dead until their bodies are found; for now, Downey is unaccounted for. On Tuesday, Downey, 63, a father of five, including two New York City fire fighters, did what 39 years of experience had taught him to do best. He arrived at an emergency and sprang into action. By several accounts, Downey moved toward the rubble of the first tower, hoping to save some of those trapped underneath. He had to have known the odds. A few months ago, he spoke about the funerals of three beloved fire fighters. “You say to yourself, ‘Not me.’ But when the unexpected happens, there’s nothing you can do about it.” When the second tower collapsed, Downey disappeared.

Downey is the most decorated fire fighter in the department, and that isn’t even at the top of his resume. He headed the search and rescue efforts at the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the TWA Flight 800 explosion in 1996. He volunteered to coordinate a rescue effort after a hurricane hit the Dominican Republic and served on the Gilmore Commission, a congressional advisory panel that last year issued a report titled Toward a National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. The man knows disaster.

He also knows what he signed up for. Speaking at another fire fighter’s funeral, this one less than two weeks ago, Downey said, “We have to accept this as part of the job. Sometimes in this job, goodbye really is goodbye.” –By Josh Tyrangiel

Captain Pat Brown, 48, always said the New York City fire department had saved his life. He came home to Queens from Vietnam in 1973 covered with medals but angry and choked up on adrenaline, daring anyone to knock the chip off his shoulder. Not good qualities for most jobs–unless you need to suit up every day against an adversary like fire. He made some spectacular rescues, including a courageous save as a lieutenant in 1991 on the roof of a midtown office building: Brown and two of his men held an inch-thick rope in their bare hands and, straining and skidding toward the parapet, lowered two fire fighters, one at a time, down into black, billowing smoke; each man grabbed a panicky victim from a windowsill perch. The lunchtime crowd below went wild with relief.

Brown eventually became one of the most decorated members in the history of the department. Women were attracted by the face, the Cagney voice and the “hero” who made the papers–including the time he chased down a mugger in Central Park during his workout. But he was restless. Brown, who never married, gave up drinking and late nights to read up on religion, get a black belt in karate, learn yoga. He volunteered as a self-defense teacher for the blind. The honors and citations didn’t mean what they once did, as he watched mentors and proteges die in fires. Still, he loved fire fighting. Last Tuesday his company got the call to go to the World Trade Center. Fire fighter Brandon Gill says someone yelled, “Don’t go in there, Paddy!” but Brown called back, “Are you nuts? We’ve got a job to do!” and rushed up the stairs of the north tower with his men, past the engine companies with their hoses, to look for trapped office workers. Said Gill: “One of the newspapers called him ‘the gallant Captain Pat Brown.’ That’s exactly what he was.” –By Ellin Martens

Questions of Chance

“Shallow men believe in luck,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, but World Trade Center employees who happened to miss work on Sept. 11 must think him a fool. We heard these stories all week, and they gave us a national case of goose bumps: the bus from Staten Island missed for the first time in four years, the car that needed repairing, the long-debated trip to Israel taken last week that proved safer than staying home. Even the most rational person lists toward superstition after hearing the stories. Was there a reason? Is God making choices? Why me?

The questions haunt the fortunate. Rob Garrard, 45, worked for IBM on the 97th floor of 1 World Trade Center. According to his hometown paper in Plymouth, England, Garrard’s sister said he escaped death by “sheer fluke… He was late leaving home because he had to make some calls, then he took the bins out and had to catch a later train.” Such are the mundane “run of events,” as Garrard later called them, that change fate. He arrived at work an hour and 10 minutes later than usual and was waiting for the elevator when Flight 11 crashed. Few people who worked as high as 97 survived. “He lost a lot of friends,” says his wife Bridgette. “He’s completely devastated.”

But any blessings from Sept. 11 should be cherished, as the Marisa family knows. Shortly before 9 a.m., Kurt Marisa, 42, called his dad Rudy to ask if he had heard from Kurt’s brother Kent, who worked in the American Express building across from the Trade Center. Rudy said Kent was fine, so Kurt returned to his duties–at the Pentagon. Within minutes, of course, a second plane would crash into the south tower; a third would hit the Pentagon. Now Rudy and his wife Jacquelyn couldn’t reach either son. Rudy, a basketball coach, gamed out grim odds. “There was a good chance I could lose at least one.”

It was around that time that Rudy heard about a fourth plane. It had slammed into Somerset County, Pa., only two counties away from his home in Waynesburg. Today all the Marisas are grateful to be alive. As they know, it is only shallow men who discount luck. –By John Cloud

The G Man

Until he retired from the FBI in August, John O’Neill, 49, was America’s pit bull on terrorism. As head of the bureau’s national-security operations in New York City, he oversaw investigations into the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, both believed to be the work of groups linked to Osama bin Laden. Two weeks ago, O’Neill began a new job: chief of security at the World Trade Center.

The Yemenite government nicknamed O’Neill “Rambo.” It did not use the name fondly. O’Neill didn’t just request access and information from officials in Yemen; he demanded them. He insisted that his agents be allowed to carry automatic rifles for protection. Ultimately, O’Neill was barred from Yemen by U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine for irritating his hosts. His agents, however, were grateful for his unwavering intransigence. Said an admirer: “O’Neill has been thrown out of better places than that.”

Because of his expertise, O’Neill knew exactly what terrorists could do. “A lot of these groups now have the capability and the support infrastructure in the U.S. to attack us here if they choose to,” he said in 1997. Three years later, he made what could have been the defining mistake of his career: he left a briefcase full of national-security documents in a Tampa, Fla., hotel. The case was recovered unharmed, and the FBI declined to press charges. But O’Neill will not be remembered for that anomalous mistake. After the first strike on the Trade Center, it is believed he evacuated his 34th-floor office in the north tower. He made a few calls from the sidewalk–including one to his son to let him know he was unharmed and one to FBI headquarters. Then he went back in to help with the rescue effort. He has not been seen since. –By Josh Tyrangiel/Reported by Benjamin Nugent

Paws in the Dust

There are no tidy rules for working through grief. Dr. Larry Hawk, whose sister Kathy Nicosia was a flight attendant aboard American Airlines Flight 11, grieved through working. In the days following the crashes, Hawk manned one of the hundreds of triage units along Manhattan’s West Side Highway. But his unit was unique. It was equipped with miniature IV bags, water bowls and dog food to rescue and revive the thousands of pets stranded in crumbling and evacuated buildings in lower Manhattan.

The president and CEO of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Hawk quickly mobilized a team of veterinarians, police officers and pet psychologists to escort pet owners through the dead zone to their former apartments. Wearing a green A.S.P.C.A. T shirt over his plaid shirt and chinos, Hawk listened to their stories and calmly vowed to help. He was on hand to reunite Leslie Long and Doug Murray with their two cats, which had survived for 48 hours on little more than toilet water. Their apartment was coated with several inches of filth, with only a trail of paw prints peeking through the dust.

Hawk also worried about the welfare of the police dogs sifting through the rubble. Many of their paws were torn on jagged wreckage, and rescuers had begun wrapping their legs in flimsy burlap. Hawk and his colleagues started a collection drive for protective doggie booties. In a week like this, some might find it strangely incidental to pay so much attention to pets. Hawk disagreed. “I spend my life teaching humane principles. If we learn how to be more humane to animals, we hope it will rub off on people,” Hawk said. He paused. “What happened to my sister was very inhumane.” –By Jodie Morse

The Stations of Grief

It might be easier to believe the Twin Towers had been knocked to the ground if people at the 69th Regiment Armory were crying, if they were clinging to one another in tight bunches, filling the gaping auditorium with sobs. But they aren’t. Assembled in the hall are thousands of the walking wounded–the hollow-eyed mothers, lovers, brothers of people who went to work two days ago and disappeared. They answer police officers’ questions, they hand over dental records, they describe the meaning of obscure tattoos, they feel sick, they tear up, they pick at ham sandwiches. But only very rarely does someone begin to weep.

Which is not to say that these people–plastering the city with MISSING flyers, giving strangers intimate descriptions of a boyfriend’s piercings–hold out much hope that their loved ones are alive. They know better, of course. But they need time, time to find some way to fit what has happened into the story of their lives.

In the long line for filing missing-persons reports, an elderly couple holds hands and stares straight ahead, not speaking. A pregnant woman in a brown knit dress shifts her weight from one foot to the other. And Felipe Oyola, 24, and his mother-in-law Nelida Rivera fill in a form that more than 4,900 other families have filed since Sept. 11. Name: Adianes Cortez-Oyola. Birthday: Aug. 9, 1978. Marital status: Married–on March 25, 2000 (in St. Agatha’s Church in Brooklyn; she and Felipe planned it all themselves).

Felipe and Adianes met seven years ago, when they worked together after school at Roy Rogers. They were still working together, at Fuji Bank’s offices in the World Trade Center’s south tower. They rode the bus together each morning. She would go to the 82nd floor, where she supervised the payroll; he went one floor below, to run the mailroom. One floor can make all the difference.

On Tuesday, after hearing the first crash in the neighboring tower, they met in front of the 78th-floor express elevators. But an announcement assured them they were safe, so they parted and went back upstairs. After the second explosion, this time in their building, the room collapsed on Oyola. He groped his way to a staircase, made it all the way outside, and started looking for his wife. Then he heard what sounded like a train barreling toward him. It was, in fact, the sound of 110 floors collapsing on top of one another. “I just started running. And after about half a block, I froze.” Having lost his shoes in the wreckage, he bundled his feet in towels bound with duct tape and started to look for Adianes again. But the collapsing buildings pushed him farther and farther away.

Now Oyola’s Brooklyn apartment serves as a mini-command center to coordinate the search. Friends have posted flyers and e-mailed photos, telling everyone to look for a 5-ft. 4-in. woman with brown eyes and long, recently dyed, dark red hair. He can’t stop shuffling from hospital to hospital, can’t stop staring at the TV screen. “I want to turn it off, but I can’t. I’m hoping that I’ll see something, that I’ll see her.” He owes her this, at the very least.

At the end of the day, after the report is finally filed, Oyola does stop. He stares far away. He says he can’t feel lucky to be alive because his wife is gone. With that, his mother-in-law Rivera jumps out of her chair, tears running down her face, and kisses his cheek. She has driven 18 hours from Florida to find her daughter. “Don’t lose your hope, for me, don’t lose your hope,” she whispers. On Friday, Rivera drops hair samples off at the Armory. Oyola cancels Adianes’ bank card and spends the rest of the day wandering around Brooklyn, unable to be in their home without her. He does not return to the Armory. –By Amanda Ripley. Reported by Amanda Bower