Rahway

Tyrone May

Tyrone May’s music collection was vast: hundreds and hundreds of records and CD’s, running the gamut from reggae and disco to rhythm and blues. And his apartment in Rahway, N.J., was littered with the announcements for record fairs he received in the mail each month. Naturally, people leapt to conclusions.

“Everybody comes into the apartment and says, ‘Who’s the D.J.?’ ” said Mr. May’s wife, Marva May. The truth is that on any given day, Mr. May, 44, an auditor with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, was more likely to be crunching numbers than spinning records. But he had an expert ear and, more important, the party-planning skills of a born impresario.

Nearly every December, Mr. May would rent a club somewhere in the city and throw a huge dance party for a few hundred friends and family members. By early September, he had a date (Dec. 15) and location (a club in Brooklyn). On Sept. 11, before he left home for 2 World Trade Center, Mr. May told his wife to keep an eye out for a fax from the agency that was designing the tickets for the event.

“I still have the fax,” said Mrs. May, who is saving many of her husband’s possessions for their son, Tyrone Jr., 2. “Everything is the same way since he left.”

Manette Marie Beckles

Mark Stephen Carney

Richard Carney was haunted by a dream. In it he was walking through empty hospital corridors searching for someone. The “bizarre dream” woke him from his sleep three times in August. The following month, his younger brother, Mark Carney, 41, died in the World Trade Center attacks. Just as odd, said Richard Carney, was that the two had talked about terrorist attacks in June after a suicide bomber struck a Tel Aviv discotheque.

“We were talking about terrorism and we were concerned about security. We were talking about how easy it would be for a truck to blow up on a street while people were eating lunch,” Richard Carney said. “We had a premonition that something was going to happen.” Mr. Carney was a recruiter for the Association of Independent Recruiters on the 79th floor of Tower One. He grew up in Woodbridge, graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas High School of Edison and received a bachelor’s degree in history from St. Peter’s University in Jersey City before moving to Rahway six years ago.

On Sept. 11, Mr. Carney managed to call his brother, who also works in New York. “He said he was not afraid,” said Richard Carney. “I told him to meet me at 40 Wall Street where I work . . . He said, ‘I have to go now.’ ” That was the last conversation the brothers had. A devout Catholic, Mr. Carney regularly attended St. Thomas the Apostle Byzantine Catholic Church in Rahway, sitting in the same pew every week and carrying his Bible. “He was a really quiet guy,” said his sister-in-law Patricia Carney. “He was the kind of person who never had a bad word to say about anyone.”