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As phones stay silent, reality sets in for victims' relatives

By the New York Times
Published August 3, 2007

Abundia Martinez, 31, weeps with her 2-month-old daughter, Lorena, for her husband, Artemio Trinidad-Mena, who was 29.
	[AP photo]

MINNEAPOLIS -- The couple were having their typical after-work conversation on Wednesday. Sherry Engebretsen, a financial director, told her husband, Ron, that she'd had a long day of meetings. He said that they should talk about it later, when she got home. She said, "Okay, I'll see you in a few minutes."

That was about 5:45 p.m., and Sherry Engebretsen was on her way to the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River. When she had not arrived home by the time dinner would usually be on the table, her daughter Jessica said she "just started calling and calling and calling" her mother's cell phone.

There would be no answer. On Thursday, the Engebretsens were among an untold number of families awaiting information -- any at all -- about the missing.

They got bad news late in the day when the county medical examiner listed Sherry Engebretsen as one of four dead in the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge on Wednesday.

Others still held out hope that their missing sons, mothers or cousins had simply lost their way, or were alive but unconscious in a hospital.

The authorities said 20 to 30 people remained unaccounted for after hours of searching on land and in the water.

At the Holiday Inn Metrodome, on the north side of the river near the collapse scene, the ballroom has been transformed from a place of celebration into a waiting room of the worst sort, a somber chamber where the loved ones of the missing wait for news.

"It was my son, my son," a Nigerian woman who gave her name only as Mafe said. Asked what information she had been given, Mafe said, "Nothing."

"I've called his cell phone so many times," she said. "It's not picking up. Not picking up."

Asked why she thought her son might be among the dead, Mafe said that he was never out of touch, and that on Wednesday evening he told her that he was heading with his girlfriend in the direction of the I-35W span.

Mafe's friend tried to calm her. "She's so devastated," she said. "She can't speak anymore."

By early afternoon, the realization that many people were not going to be pulled from the water was beginning to set in.

Abdiaziz Ahmed, a taxi driver, said that a cousin, Sadia Adam Sahal, was missing. He had spent the night and morning shuttling his extended family from hospital to hospital, and back to the Holiday Inn again to check for updates.

"We couldn't sleep," he said. "How can you sleep if all of your family is not okay?"

Sahal was with her 1-year-old daughter, Hannah, Ahmed said.

The Rev. Devin Miller, of the Emmanuel Tabernacle church in south Minneapolis, said that he and other volunteers in the makeshift family waiting room at the Holiday Inn were trying their hardest just to be of comfort. An arm around a shoulder, a hand held, prayers said.

"There's just this giant sense of 'I don't know,'" he said. "The story is always the same: 'I talked to my brother at 5:30, he said he was on his way home, I never heard from him again.'"

Inside the ballroom, volunteers from the American Red Cross registered families and tried to guide them, with the help of counselors and chaplains, through the agony of the long wait. About 60 people showed up on Wednesday night. Several dozen registered on Thursday.

FAST FACTS: Confirmed victims
Four people who died on the bridge have been identified:

• Sherry Lou Engebretsen, 60, of Shoreview, Minn.
• Artemio Trinidad-Mena, 29, of Minneapolis
• Patrick Holmes, 36, of Moundsview, Minn.
• Julie Blackhawk, 32, of Savage, Minn.

[Last modified August 3, 2007, 01:42:09]