Five from Hawai'i may be victims
Advertiser Staff
As many as five people from Hawai'i may be victims in the terrorist attack yesterday .
Christine Snyder
A newly married Kailua woman who was an active member of the Outdoor Circle was one of 38 passengers killed when a hijacked United Airlines plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field yesterday, her husband said today.
Christine Snyder, 32, project manager with the Outdoor Circle, had been in Washington, D.C., for an urban forestry conference. She had traveled with Outdoor Circle chief executive officer Mary Steiner on a trip to New York Saturday for a couple of days, said Steiner's husband, David Atkin.
Atkin said the two were on their way home yesterday. Snyder took United flight 93, while his wife flew home via Minneapolis, he said.
Flight 93 was hijacked and crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh shortly after two hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
"I have confirmation that she was on that flight," said Snyder's husband, Ian Tescaia, 35. They were married three months ago at Kualoa Ranch. "Right now it's kind of tough," he said.
Atkin said he began getting calls at 4 a.m. yesterday from friends on the East Coast concerned about his wife, and wanting to know if he had heard from her.
But almost immediately Steiner called him from Toronto, where her plane had been diverted. He said the two of them did not find out about Snyder until several hours later.
"She's very upset, very upset," Atkin said. "It's a small, tight office. To lose someone so unexpectedly like this is really upsetting."
Atkin said Snyder was very active with the Outdoor Circle, which sponsors outdoor beautification projects, and the local arborists association.
"She was incredible. She was vivacious; she was full of life. She was really into the Outdoor Circle," he said.
Maile Hale
Also among those unaccounted for is 1993 Kaiser High School graduate Maile R. Hale. Hale, who is vice president of operations for a financial company in Boston, was attending a one-week conference in one of the World Trade Center towers, said family friend Wendie Wong.
Wong said Hale's parents, Architects Hawai'i vice-chairman Rob Hale and Carol Hale, plan to fly to New York as soon as possible.
"I don't think there's a gentler, kinder soul than Maile. This is just so tragic," said family friend Diane Ueki, who has known Hale since she was a little girl. She said Hale was class valedictorian and a soccer player, and that "her bad day would be (getting) an A-minus or B-plus." Hale was also a member of Kaiser High School's Amnesty International, the math team, and the National Honor Society. She graduated from Wesleyan University.
"Maile was truly an exceptional young lady, intelligent, conscientious and ever so kind," Ueki said, sighing deeply. "She was just the kindest soul on earth. She truly, truly loved her family. Her family was really her life, you know. I cannot say enough about this young lady."
"Whenever we would ask her, 'You know Maile, what would you like to be?' She was very, very calm, very, very kind. She would say, 'I would just like to be a mom.'"
Heather Ho
Capital Investment of Hawai'i chairman and president Stuart Ho said his daughter, Heather M. Ho, a 32-year-old professional pastry chef, who was working in the the Windows on the World restaurant at the time of the attack is still missing. Ho said phone calls to his daughter's Manhattan home have gone unanswered.
Ho said the search continues for his daughter and added "things are in a very confused state; people are trying their best."
Heather Ho worked on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, the first building hit in yesterday's attack.
Until his retirement last year, Ho was chairman of Gannett Pacific Corp. and a member of the board of directors of Gannett Corp., which owns The Advertiser.
Heather Ho's uncle Stanley Hong, who recently retired as president and chief executive officer of the Chamber of Commerce of Hawai'i, said Heather had moved to New York from San Francisco within the past year.
Georgine Corrigan
Georgine Corrigan lived with her daughter and grandchildren in Hawai'i Kai but traveled the world as an antiques dealer.
Corrigan, 56, who used to own Courtyard Antiques shop at Kilohana Square in Kapahulu, was returning from the East Coast after helping her brother run a booth at an outdoor antiques festival last week in Massachusetts.
Her brother, Kevin Marisay, drove her to the airport.
She arrived early enough to make the 8 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 heading from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco. It was the terror-filled flight in which air traffic controllers reported they could hear screaming over the cockpit radio and passengers made air phone calls saying they were being hijacked.
Two hours after it took off, the plane nose-dived into a Pennsylvania field and killed all 38 passengers and seven crew members.
"I understand people on that airplane attacked the hijackers," her brother said. "My sister would have led them in any way, shape, or form."
Jude Larson
Jude Larson was a good man with so much going for him, those who knew him said.
The former Maui resident was moving with speed through medical school. He recently married a Gucci model and was expecting his first child.
But that bright future was smashed in an instant Tuesday when American Airlines Flight 11, headed from Boston to Los Angeles, was hijacked by terrorists who flew it into the World Trade Center.
Both Larson, 31, and his wife, Natalie, who was four months pregnant, were on board.
"He was an amazing guy, a cool kid,'' said Steve Jocelyn of Lahaina, a Maui surfing buddy and friend of Larson's father, Lahaina sculptor Curtis Larson. "He was a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky guy with a good heart.''
Curtis Larson, 52, a resident of Maui since 1974, is a part-time substitute librarian whose artwork is often on display at the Village Galleries Maui in Lahaina.
His only son went to Lahainaluna High School for a while in the mid-1980s and, like his dad, he loved to surf and play the guitar.
Larson, who visited Maui often, was a horticulturist living in Washington state when he decided to enter medical school a few years ago.
"He felt it was time to achieve this goal. He did not want to procrastinate any longer,'' Jocelyn said.
His photographic memory not only helped him ace the entrance examine but propel him into the third year at UCLA medical school after only 18 months.
"This is a real tragedy for Larson (the dad),'' Jocelyn said. "He wanted to be a doctor himself. But after serving in Vietnam, his life was so dysfunctional that the last thing he wanted to do was to go to medical school.
"He's put his own desires into this. He's invested a lot into his son.''
The couple was in Boston visiting Natalie's family. The plan was to return to Los Angeles, where Natalie would help set up her husband's apartment for two weeks before flying back to Italy for more modeling.
Curtis Larson was planning a trip to visit his son at Thanksgiving.
"He's in big-time pain right now,'' Jocelyn said of the father. "When you lose a son, it's so unnatural. You don't expect to outlive your child.''
Hawai'i people recount terror
On the ground below the World Trade Center, Eric Ogawa knew something was wrong when he stepped off the New York City subway to go to his office on the north tower's 82nd floor and saw people running through heavy smoke.
"I could feel it. Everything was rattling. People were running and screaming," said Ogawa, 36, vice president and analyst in the credit division of Fuji Bank. "I saw that my building was burning. At that point I told myself, I'd better get out of here."
Even for those with no personal stake in the tragedy, a surreal quality pervaded yesterday's tragedy.
Honolulu resident Jim Delano, stopping off in New York on a trip to Baltimore, stood on the roof of a 12-story building and watched the shadowy specter of the second airplane crash into the World Trade Center.
"It was like a mushroom cloud," he said.
Advertiser staff writers Curtis Lum, Vicki Viotti, Johnny Brannon, Catherine Toth, Yasmin Anwar, Tanya Bricking, Timothy Hurley, Lynda Arakawa and Brandon Masuoka contributed to this report.
