Agonizing Wait For Familes

' Hope is the only thing we have'

By Melanie Lefkowitz | STAFF WRITER

September 16, 2001

Mary Ortale is doing everything she can to find her missing son, Peter. Yesterday, that included sitting still while officials took DNA from her mouth with a cotton swab.

She and her three daughters, scouring area hospitals and clinging to threadbare strands of hope, are trying not to think about what that might mean.

But they can't help it.

"It makes you feel like they're going to identify a body," said Peter's sister, Cathy Ortale. "We want to do whatever's possible. It's hard to not know - and if there's something that we need to know, we want to know it."

The city medical examiner's office is asking that families provide comprehensive medical records to help in the effort to identify victims. That means not only dental X-rays of their missing loved ones, but full dental charts and medical records. These may be used to identify some bodies, based on their teeth and jaws.

For the fifth consecutive day, families of the missing thronged the Armory on Lexington Avenue, praying that this time they would find their loved ones' names on a painfully short list of crash survivors. Taping fresh fliers to walls, phone booths, bus shelters and the sides of news vans, many remained ever hopeful that their son, mother, fiance or friend would be found alive.

It was all they could do.

"We are just hoping today is the day someone will recognize her," said Steven Wright. A photo of his wife, Sandra, hung around his neck as he hurried down the street. "I just want to get as many pictures of her out there as possible."

Santosh Amradkar, whose good friend, Anil Umarkar, 34, of Hackensack, N.J., is among the missing, said he had just dropped off Anil's shaving brush, scissors and razor for analysis. Umarkar was on the 103rd floor of Tower One at the time of the crash and has not been heard from or seen since.

"What we're thinking right now is, he's not conscious, he's injured, he's not carrying identification," Amradkar said. "Until we hear something confirmed, we are going to continue hoping."

Anthony Gardner said his family had brought in dental records for his brother, Harvey Gardner, 35, and still expects to find him alive. But as the days pass and no one from his brother's 83rd floor office turns up, he said it's grown more and more difficult.

When they spotted Harvey's name on an Internet list of survivors that turned out to be a hoax, it nearly broke them, he said.

"Oh, my God, words cannot express, we were so excited," he said. "That was the worst hit we took."

By yesterday, most of the phony sites had been taken down.

"We don't know what to believe," said Cathy Ortale, whose brother also showed up on a survivor site. "That's our biggest hope right now. Maybe someone pulled him into an apartment and they're taking care of him."

Some said the stubborn hope may just be a form of disbelief.

"I don't know what to do without him in my life," Liz Hickey-Murray said, sobbing as she described her friend, Joe Riverso, 34, of Silver Lake, as a man who works four jobs, including one at Cantor Fitzgerald, to provide for his young daughter. "He's the best person in the world."

Michael Wittenstein of Seaford, missing since Tuesday, would have been married next month. His weekend-long bachelor party was to have started yesterday. Asked his age, his sister, Caryn Wittenstein, said, "He was 34."

"He IS 34," her cousin corrected sharply.

"Hope is the only thing we have," Caryn said. "Without that, that would be it. There would be nothing."