Re: Haiti Earthquake - US Citizens known, reported or presumed to be dead: 104 as of 03/08/2010, estimated 2000 missing
Across USA, many still wait for word about loved ones in Haiti
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</TD></TR><TR><TD class=vaLink width=80 height=18></TD><TD class=photoCredit align=right width=165>By Michael A. Schwarz, USA TODAY</TD></TR><TR><TD colSpan=2 height=1>
</TD></TR><TR><TD class=photoCredit colSpan=2>Lorie Apperson, with son Chris Posey, waited for 50 days before receiving word about her husband's remains in Haiti. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
By
Marisol Bello, USA TODAY
David Apperson's clothes hang untouched in his closet. His office door remains shut. His
Harley-Davidson motorcycle sits in the garage, just where he parked it before he went to
Haiti on a business trip in January.
Since an earthquake leveled Haiti's capital city,
Port-au-Prince, on Jan. 12, Apperson's family in Sparks, Ga., had not heard from him. His wife, Lorie, says she knew her husband was not alive, but she could not face dismantling any part of his life until his body came home.
On Wednesday, 50 days since their last contact, she finally received word: His remains were found. He was coming home.
"It's a call I've been waiting for," she says, crying. "Even though I knew for two months he was dead, it's just so hard right now."
Apperson is the last American whom searchers were looking for in the rubble of the luxurious Hotel Montana, which was popular among foreign visitors. The bodies of all 17 Americans reported at the hotel have now been found.
The quake left at least 200,000 people dead and 300,000 injured. The tremors have left much of the capital and neighboring towns along the western coast in ruins. The
United Nations estimates that 285,000 houses collapsed, leaving 1.3 million people living in makeshift tent settlements.
Efforts to recover Americans at the Hotel Montana have gotten the most attention, but more are missing elsewhere. The State Department lists 3,000 people whose families phoned to report them missing. Of those, it estimates 2,000 Americans are unaccounted for, spokesman John Echard Jr. says. Many are Haitian Americans, spokesman Gordon Duguid says.
The
International Committee of the Red Cross has a website on which people have posted photos and descriptions. About 23,000 people have listed someone; half the postings were from the United States.
A team of forensic pathologists, anthropologists and dentists from the United States is searching for Americans at 112 sites around Port-au-Prince: hotels, schools, shopping centers, convents and private homes. So far, 104 Americans have been confirmed dead, the State Department says.
Given the chaos after the quake and the tens of thousands of dead buried in mass graves, many families may never know how their loved ones died or what happened to their bodies.
"It's very unfortunate, but the prospects for the identification of bodies are quite low given the manner and extent of the disaster, the number of people killed and the number buried in mass graves," says Robert Zimmerman, deputy head of the central tracing agency of the Red Cross.
"Some cases will not be solved and families will remain with uncertainty."
For the families of missing earthquake victims, every day is an exercise in alternating anxiety, anger, tears and denial. Some learned early that their loved ones were dead. They began holding memorials and grieving. Some still wait. One minute they cling to hope for a miracle that a loved one is alive in an air pocket with food and water. The next, they face the likelihood that after eight weeks with no word, their relatives are dead.
"It's as if I was walking through waist-deep water every day," says Lucy Vaughters, the sister of Frank Vaughters, a Kansas City pediatrician whose remains were found at the Hotel Montana on Feb. 26. "It's like an unfinished feeling. ? After a while, you want it to be finished."
Much more at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-03-07-haiti_N.htm
