A New Home, but Without Dad

By Theresa Vargas | STAFF WRITER

September 21, 2001

Even before the paperwork was complete, architect Obdulio Ruiz-Diaz was already planning changes to his family's new home in Valley Stream: an expanded children's room, an extra bedroom, a new color for the interior.

"He really wanted this house," said Marian Ruiz-Diaz, his niece. "He had plans for it."

But three days after Ruiz-Diaz was lost among others in the rubble of the World Trade Center disaster, his wife, Rosa, and three children, Vanessa, 9, Pamela, 8, and Bryan, 6, had to make the move without him. The papers had already been signed; the boxes were already half-packed.

On Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, Ruiz-Diaz, a draftsman with Bronx Builders, was in a meeting with co-workers Joshua Poptean and Manuel DaMota on the 107th floor of Tower One in the World Trade Center. The three were discussing a remodeling job for Windows on the World.

It was supposed to be a one-hour meeting, from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., Ruiz-Diaz's family said. But after two hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers in what became the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, none of the men have been heard from since.

"It's brutal," said Richard Weisfeld, a co-owner of Bronx Builder. In a business of 80 workers, he added, "it's definitely felt."

On Saturday, 20 of Ruiz-Diaz's co-workers helped the family complete the move from the single-floor they rented in a Kew Gardens' house to their own home in Valley Stream.

For months, the quiet graduate of the National University of Paraguay walked around the office talking about the deal, draftsman Martin Chasteau said.

"He said, 'I'm supposed to be moving next weekend,'" Chasteau said. "That weekend never came for him."

Even when the move was complete after six hours last Saturday, "there was something missing, you could feel it," Chasteau said. In their cream-colored, three-bedroom home, Rosa Ruiz-Diaz sat among unpacked clothes and assembled furniture, waiting.

"We're still hoping," she said. "I have to keep faith he's returning, not only for me, for my children."

She described her husband as the type of father that would leave work early to pick the children up from school, only to return to work again. He was the kind of dad, family members added, who made sure their house had a backyard and was in a safe neighborhood so his children could play.

Like their mother, the kids wait for their father's return.

"They say 'Oh my dad is supposed to help me with my homework,'" Marian Ruiz-Diaz said, remembering how her uncle would help them with schoolwork at tabletops brimming with his blueprints. "He always had a pencil or ruler in hand."

The family prays daily, she added.

"Christ says if you have faith, you can move mountains," Marian Ruiz- Diaz said.