The desperate quest to find loved ones started just minutes after the
earthquake, as cell phones rang unanswered from beneath the rubble of
Haiti's best hotel.
A few hours later, the search went online with a Facebook page dedicated to the Hotel Montana.
It was created by three siblings on Long Island, New York, looking for
their missing uncle. Strangers immediately began to post names and
photographs of their relatives. By the next morning, the site had
received more than 50 messages from frantic families.
As the days passed and the death toll
climbed, the number of members on the page grew until it reached 17,427
people from around the world. They called themselves "the family." They
adopted a profile picture of a rock inscribed with the word "Hope." And
they vowed to stick together until every last member of their online
tribe was brought home, alive or dead.
"Though we're all ready for this night to end and a
faint glimpse of sunlight to illuminate the horizon, I'm fairly
confident from getting to know you over the past several weeks that
you're ready to stand together," wrote the site's Tennessee-based
moderator, Bob Allen, nearly two months after the quake. "Till the last one is home."
___
The luxury $200-a-night Montana sat on a steep hill
overlooking the capital. A visitor on TripAdvisor.Com compared it to "a
vanilla wedding cake cascading down the wooded hillside."
Over the years, the hotel acquired a reputation as a
refuge from the country's chaos. It was where Bill Clinton, the Rev.
Jesse Jackson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu had stayed.
On Jan. 12, at least 100 people were booked in the
hotel, and possibly as many as 100 more were on site for the weekly
barbecue as well as a conference on neglected tropical diseases. Among
them were Siegfried Francisco, head of civil aviation for the Caribbean
island of Curacao, and his colleague, Auxencio "Angelo" Isenia, who were
in Haiti for an air safety conference.
Before leaving home, Francisco, 57, remembered to
give his wife money to rent a sailboat for his daughter Desiree's 27th
birthday that weekend. "In case I get held up," he said as he headed
out.
Aviation inspector Isenia also left a parting gift.
On past trips, the 54-year-old had made a heart out of towels on the bed
he shares with his wife. That morning, he glued a heart made out of
toilet paper on the mirror. Then he made the letter U and glued it next
to the heart, as in: "Love you."
Among the Montana's other guests was Roger Gosselin,
78, a Canadian professor recently retired from the University of
Montreal, who had trouble booking a room because the hotel was sold out.
He got a last-minute e-mail from a friend in Haiti: "My dear friend
Roger, I was able to find a room for you at the Montana because you are
my good friend!"
Before leaving, Gosselin sent his girlfriend of more
than a decade an e-mail saying that he did not want to wake her and he
loved her more than ever.
Gosselin arrived at the Montana around the same time
as a group of college students who had spent the morning at an
orphanage. The 12 students from Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida,
had agreed to forfeit their January vacation to do social work overseas.
Just after 4 p.m., Britney Gengel, a 19-year-old
sophomore, called her mother to say, "Mom, this is what I want to do
with the rest of my life ... I want to start an orphanage." Minutes
later, her classmate Stephanie Crispinelli, also 19, called her father
to say she too knew what she wanted to do with her life: Help the poor.
One of the last rooms went to Chrystel Cancel, 35, a
USAID contractor who was late because she had missed her flight. She
headed downstairs with her laptop in search of a Wifi signal to chat
with her fiance. He had asked her to marry him three days earlier.
At 4:02 p.m., contractor David Apperson of Sparks,
Georgia, had texted his wife to say he was planning to switch hotels
because the Montana did not serve Bud Light.
__
It began at 4:53 p.m. with a terrible sound. The
mountain started to tremble. The walls rippled. The hotel's five stories
folded like an accordion. In most of the rooms, the ceiling came to
rest less than 1 foot off the carpeted floor.
Hundreds of miles away in Panama, Eric Nyman's Skype screen went blank.
Nyman, Chrystel Cancel's fiance, had been chatting with her when she
stopped responding in mid-sentence. He tried her cell. It went straight
to voicemail.
In Curacao, Marydith Isenia, 51, was cooking beans, one of her husband
Angelo's favorite dishes, to thank him for the paper heart. Her son ran
into the kitchen screaming, "Mom, mom — there's been an earthquake in
Haiti."
Isenia looked up from the stove. Then she went back to stirring the beans. "It's nothing," she said, laughing. "He's fine."
__
In Long Island that night, Caitlin Fuentes, a 26-year-old teacher, her
sister Lizzy and her brother Matt heard about the quake on the news.
They Googled the hotel and found nothing other than sites taking
reservations. So they created a group page for the Montana on Facebook
and posted the name of their uncle.
Within minutes, the page was flooded with the names of those missing
inside the hotel. The sisters grabbed a napkin and started making a
list. By the time they got the phone call that their uncle was alive at 1
a.m. the next day, the napkin was overflowing with names. They started a
spreadsheet.
In Curacao, Marydith Isenia's son posted a picture of his stepfather in
his aviation uniform. A few miles away on the same arid island, Desiree
Francisco logged into Facebook. "Hoping everything is fine with my dad,"
she posted on the same site.
In her condo in Montreal, Canada, 49-year-old administrative assistant
Sylvie Leroux kept checking her inbox for a message from professor
Gosselin, her companion. He called her 'My Sylvie' and liked to surprise
her by leaving a freshly cut flower on her plate at dinnertime.
She addressed him directly on the Facebook page: "Roger we miss you so
much," Leroux wrote. "Where are you? We want to find you. I'll take
really good care of you — promise. YOUR Sylvie."
__
In Haiti, the aftershocks continued to compress the Montana's already
crushed floors further down. Bodies piled up outside the hotel. The
overpowering smell of death permeated the site.
Soon the `pile' — as the destroyed hotel came to be called — was crawling with rescuers. It looked like an anthill.
It took two days for the rescuers to drill holes and penetrate the
buried lobby. There they found a group of people entombed inside a space
the size of a king-sized bed. They had survived by sharing a single
lollipop.
On Wednesday, the parents of the missing college girls got a call from
Lynn University, saying a security company hired to find the students
had arrived.
"Now is the time to Pray for Britney to be found and be safe and
sound!!! They have 2 Helicopters ready to evacuate them out!!!" her
father, Len Gengel, posted from his computer in Rutland, Massachusetts.
Britney's anguished parents contacted a local TV station to circulate
her photograph. By the time a local TV crew arrived, the missing girl's
father was shouting into the phone.
"God is good! God is good!" he screamed. "She's alive! They rescued her! ... It's a great day in this world!"
Lin Crispinelli, Stephanie's mother, got the same call. Both families flew to Florida that night.
There, the Gengels were greeted by the president of the Boca Raton
campus. With tears in his eyes, he told them there had been a mistake.
It was not their daughters on the chopper.
They caught up with Lin Crispinelli in the lobby of her hotel. When they told her, she crumpled to the floor.
__
Cancel's fiance, 37-year-old Nyman, got there on Day 4. He couldn't find
a flight to Haiti, so he flew to the neighboring Dominican Republic and
hitched a ride across the border in an ambulance. He scrambled on top
of the rubble and screamed out Chrystel's name.
__
By the end of the first week, Facebook had identified at least 51 people
from 11 countries still missing in the rubble. But the bodies pulled
out were no longer recognizable.
Governments asked their citizens to provide detailed descriptions of
loved ones, including jewelry and piercings. The descriptions went up on
the Facebook page.
Angelo Isenia's family in Curacao posted the list of jewelry he was wearing, including several rings and a cross.
Lorie Apperson, the wife of 45-year-old David Apperson, sent along a
description of the barbed wire tattoo her husband, a Harley Davidson
enthusiast, had engraved on his arm. And Stephanie Crispinelli's
brothers asked their mother to sit down and not get upset: Stephanie had
recently gotten a tattoo of a small dove.
The death estimate for the quake grew from 80,000, to 120,000, to more
than 200,000. U.S. families were asked to dial in to a daily State
Department conference call.
"Everyday it was, `We have no new information.' No new information. No
new information," said Lin Crispinelli. "You know as the days tick by
that there's only so long you can live without water."
On Day 15, the Facebookers arranged to pray together at 11 a.m. Central
time. At 11:03, a woman posted: "Praying in South Carolina." The next
post at 11:05 said: "Praying in Pensacola, Fl." At 11:06, "Praying in
Guatemala."
They prayed in Colorado Springs and Los Angeles, in Vermont and Boca
Raton, in Belgium, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast,
in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in the Dominican Republic and in Minneapolis.
More than two hours later, someone posted: "Still praying in Montreal."
Every night, the group held a vigil, with members lighting a candle next
to their computers. Many switched their profile to a picture of a
burning candle.
On Jan. 22, the government announced that it was moving from a search for the living to an attempt to recover the dead.
__
Marydith Isenia stopped being able to sleep. She became forgetful. She
still woke up at the same time every morning, then stared off into space
for an hour or two. The paper heart on the mirror fell off.
She had met her husband five years earlier after surviving divorce. She
had gone to mass every day to pray for a good man. Her son posted her
picture on http://www.christiansingles.com. Angelo Isenia was the only other person registered on the Caribbean island.
On the 22nd of every month, the couple celebrated the day they married
in December 2005. He sent her flowers. He wrote her poems. He asked her
to put on a blindfold, then drove her to a romantic dinner.
This time Jan. 22 came and went. At work, her colleagues pretended not
to notice when they found her weeping, mascara running down her cheeks.
On Feb. 1, she got the call. They sent a diplomatic pouch containing his
ring, the cross he wore and his wallet. She refused to believe it was
him.
The ceiling of the hotel had fallen across his chest. His head was spared, but from the neck down his body was flattened.
Marydith Isenia went to the funeral home and demanded to see her husband. They tried to hold her back.
"I said, I want to see my husband ... I opened the door. I faced his face. I said, `Oh, it's him.' And then I left," she says.
"And so I accepted what God had permitted. ... I accept it," she says.
The tears slide down her face. "But I have pain," she says, touching her
hand to her chest.
__
It wasn't until Day 25 that the searchers got close to the spot from
where Chrystel Cancel had sent her last Skype message. They spotted her
dusty bag. The searchers asked Nyman, her fiance who had never left the
site, to leave the grounds for a few days.
They found her on Feb. 8. He lit a candle in the spot where she was. Her
birthday had passed under the rubble. He bought a card and buried it.
He sang her `Happy Birthday,' tears streaming down his face.
__
By the middle of February, only eight members of the Facebook family still were missing.
Friends began to address them directly and even scold them about not
coming home. They posted pictures of objects and places the missing
people loved in an effort to make them `homesick.' A picture of an
ice-cold beer for Apperson. A picture of a motor home for Gosselin, who
had bought his first just months before and was planning to go RV'ing
with Leroux in the spring. A photograph of Curacao's white sand beaches
for Francisco.
They decided to honor the last man found as their 'Captain,' because
only a captain refuses to leave his ship until all the other members of
his crew have been rescued.
Sometime in February, the searchers found Stephanie Crispinelli's
journal. Her last entry describes the poverty she saw and how she wanted
to help. Her flowing script ends in mid-sentence.
They also found a crushed camera. One of the pictures on the memory card
is of Britney Gengel surrounded by pigtailed girls at the orphanage she
had visited that morning.
Stephanie was found on Feb. 11. Three days later, on Valentine's Day, Britney was pulled out of the rubble.
The searchers knew they were nearing a body when they saw the flies
gathering. The cement excavator was turned off and they dug their way to
the remains by hand.
Every day, sometimes twice daily, Sylvie Leroux posted Facebook messages to her `beautiful love.'
"Please come home, I feel like a ghost without you," she posted one day.
"So long as they haven't found you, for me you are alive," she said in
another.
"Where are you," she wrote in still another. "It hurts so much to live without you."
As more bodies were recovered, there were fewer families on the U.S.
State Department's daily phone briefing, until it was just Lorie
Apperson.
"Families kept saying, `thank you for finding my loved one,'" said
50-year-old Apperson. "And I felt happy for them. But I also felt like,
what about me? What about David?"
David Apperson, 45, had gone to Haiti to bid on a project to build
basketball courts. Weeks had passed, but his wife could not bring
herself to touch or move his things, including the Harley parked in
their garage. At the end of February, she got an e-mail asking if she
still wanted to do the call. She said no.
It was inside the most pulverised sections of the hotel that the
searchers found Gosselin and Apperson. Gosselin was getting ready to
take a shower, with a razor in his clenched hand. On one of the upper
floors, rescuers squeezed inside a void where they found the body of a
man wearing cowboy boots. The forensic team that examined the body noted
that there was a barbed wire tattoo on its arm.
"I have this image of David Apperson riding a Harley through the pearly
gates. Instead of hearing harps and the angel band we're hearing the rev
of a V-twin engine," posted a stranger on the site.
___
The Facebook group was down to just two missing men, Canadian Alexandre Bitton and aviation director Francisco of Curacao.
In the meantime, 27 unidentified bodies had been recovered from the
mound of cement. They were buried during the wait for DNA results. Most
were thought to be the hotel's Haitian employees, whose relatives had
never found the Facebook site.
A forensic team sent a sliver of bone from each for DNA analysis to a
lab in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Many of the families already had received
DNA kits. In Curacao, Desiree Francisco completed the mouthswab and
sent it back.
On the 50th day, Facebook posted that Bitton's body had been found. The
next day, the moderator bestowed the title of Captain on Siegfried
Francisco.
"That is altogether appropriate for a man who worked in aviation," wrote
Bob Allen, who had taken over moderating the site after the Fuentes
family passed it on to other members of the Facebook group. "Captain
Francisco, we salute you ... and we're all awaiting your return home."
Untangling Francisco's DNA took two months, twice as long as for anybody
else. Desiree Francisco was his only child, so her DNA at most matched
only half his genetic material. Also, the DNA culled from his decomposed
bones was degraded, like a roll of film where half or more of the
frames are overexposed.
Strangers lit candles and prayed for Francisco.
"I get off work at 5:30 tomorrow night, captain. you'd better be on your
way home by then, too," said Morgana Mouzon in San Diego, California.
"I feel like my daughter has gone out to the prom, and I am up waiting
for her to get home," posted another member. "I will not feel a true and
complete sense of peace until Siegfried is located."
___
On the outskirts of the capital is a rocky field. Ten feet below the
surface is what remains of 27 human beings, carefully divided into 27
plots. On a sunny day in May, the forensic team from Houston-based
Kenyon International returned with a metal detector, a backhoe and a
priest wearing a white cassock.
The team combed the remote burial field with a metal detector. The men
counted rows until they found the plot. The priest sprinkled the dirt
with holy water.
The backhoe pulled up mounds of earth until they saw the metal box.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Facebook moderator Allen, 47, was walking
through the houseware section of a department store with his wife on
their anniversary when he got the text. In the middle of the aisle, he
began to weep.
Later that night, he posted: "Our family is complete."
The remains of Francisco's body were placed inside a plywood coffin and
loaded into the belly of a flight to Curacao. It took off into a gray
sky. His immediate family was at his side. So was his online family, who
exploded into a cascade of posts.
"Praise God!!!" wrote one woman in Lawrenceville, Georgia. "Welcome HOME Captain!" wrote another in Orlando, Florida.
From Long Island, where the site had begun, Caitlin Fuentes wrote: "It
brings tears to my eyes thinking that every single person, every name
that is etched in our hearts forever, has been returned to their loved
ones," she said. "Tonight, we rest in somewhat peace knowing everyone is
home."
It took 127 days for Francisco to return home from his final voyage. The
clue to his identity was with him all along in a simple gold wedding
ring inscribed with one word: "Hetty."
___
Hetty Francisco, a petite brunette, stands for hours in the pew as
mourners file past. At her side is Desiree. A slow-moving fan whirs
above.
The hearse arrives escorted by a dozen police officers. The island's
flag is draped over the heavy wooden casket. The prime minister is in
attendance.
In real life he was called `Dr. Francisco.' But in the 4 1/2 months
since his death, the name given to the last man off the mountain by his
online family has stuck.
"Captain," said one of the mourners as he stood in the nave of the
church. "Your plane is ready for takeoff for your journey to heaven."
___
The Montana Facebook site has now turned into a memorial, with an online
album for each person lost and found. Sylvie Leroux still uses it to
talk to the man who left flowers on her dinner plate.
"How I love you. With you I was. Now what am I?" she wrote in a recent post. "I am an amputated soul."
Eric Nyman's Facebook picture still shows him holding the pretty
brunette whom he calls the love of his life. In the tab where Facebook
users share a description of themselves, he has entered a single word:
"Love."
Each family has found its own way to remember.
Every Friday, Lorie Apperson buys two Bud Lights and heads to the
cemetery to share a beer with her husband. She pours his next to his
grave.
The Gengels are raising money to build the orphanage in Haiti that
Britney had dreamed of. The Crispinellis are collecting donations to
build a school for poor children in Stephanie's memory. Both have made
rubber bracelets bearing the names of their girls' foundations.
Last month, Britney's younger brother Bernie laid the bracelets next to
each other in the white rubble that remains of the Montana. He snapped a
photo. It was posted on Facebook.
And Hetty Francisco has taken to calling her husband's cell phone and
listening to his voice. In the recorded message, the Captain promises he
will call back soon.