Robert Allan Hepburn
Every morning, Theresa Hepburn and her two girls would drive Robert A. Hepburn to the train station in Union, N.J., where they lived, for his commute into the city. It was just one of the many routines that defined their family life.
Another unfolded after he settled into his office. He would call every day around 8 a.m. to make sure that Allyson, 6, and Jennifer, 4, were ready for school. And he would always ask what they wanted him to bring them that night. “They always wanted gum or candy,” his wife said.
When he returned home, he would take care of the girls so their mother could go to her evening job.
Mr. Hepburn, 39, was an office service manager for Marsh USA, a job he had held for only two months. He worked on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center, and his desk was against a window with a view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and of course he shared it with his family. During the summer, Mrs. Hepburn and the girls took the train into the city every Thursday for lunchtime concerts downtown.
“He would go down to our train and meet us and put us in our seats, and then he’d go back upstairs to work,” she recalled. “Then he’d come down during his lunch hour and watch the rest of the show with us.”
Edward Calderon
Calderon was always proud to wear the uniform that marked him as a security guard for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but his feet felt best in dancing shoes. “When I think of him I remember that he loved salsa,” said his niece, Desiree Henley. “He was extremely outgoing, loved to dance.”
He was the life of any gathering, said his sister-in-law, Sandra Calderon. And for years, he organized a regular Wednesday night salsa party in different locations at the World Trade Center for anybody who wanted to come, said his brother, Anthony. “He liked to act and he wanted to direct — he was an entertainer,” Anthony said. “That was his knowledge. That was his calling.”
Eddie Calderon, 43, lived in Jersey City and worked at the trade center for 22 years. He was last seen running toward the north tower after helping guide dozens of workers to safety. He was hoping to reach a few more just before the building collapsed, Mr. Calderon’s boss told his brother.
Khalid M. Shahid
Khalid Shahid and his fiancée, Jamie Castro, had everything planned. They were building a house in Mount Olive, N.J., close to Union, where he grew up and where his parents still live. They were to marry in November. When the first baby came, Leonor Shahid, his mother, was going to quit her job to baby-sit while her son and daughter-in-law were at work.
Mr. Shahid, 25, had three passions:
Computers. He was a network systems administrator at eSpeed;
Sports. He had been in the ski club and tennis club at Montclair State University. “He was very, very fond of skiing,” Mrs. Shahid said;
Most of all, his family, present and future. “His idea was to create a family just like ours,” his mother said. He had a younger sister and brother. His father, Syed, an engineer, came from Pakistan, and his mother was from Colombia. “He’d tell us all the time, he was so proud.”
Charles Karczewski
Charles Henry Karczewski did not have children, but he might as well have. His two dogs, Princess, a yellow Labrador, and Baby, a cocker spaniel, are devastated that he is gone, said his wife, Philomena. “Every male person that walks in the house they look at, and you see the disappointment in their eyes,” she said. For comfort, they are sleeping with one of Mr. Karczewski’s dirty shirts.
His dogs and his wife were only two of Mr. Karczewski’s passions. He loved “that stupid trade center,” as she put it, where he had worked for three years as a benefits consultant for the Aon Corporation . Every time they drove by the buildings, he would say, “I work there.”
He loved to talk, and hated silence. He loved wine and the beach. He loved the stock market, even when it was on the downswing (“You never marry a stock,” he liked to say), and had started a stock club.
Mr. Karczewski, 34, loved to vacation, often in adventurous ways – sky-diving, canoeing, kayaking. He had been to Italy, Bermuda and Alaska, among other places. This month, he and his wife were planning to go to Arizona. The books he had ordered about hiking the Grand Canyon arrived last week.
Brian Frederic Goldberg
Jodie and Brian Goldberg started dating in high school. After seven years — going to the movies, roaming the New Jersey suburbs, eating out in Manhattan — they got married in May 2000 at a temple in New Jersey. “We danced,” Mrs. Goldberg said. “We were just so happy.”
They moved into a new town house in Union, N.J., after the wedding, and he hung the fans, wired the stereos and “made everything work.” He was the handyman in the extended family. He fixed a broken wall unit at his sister’s house and made a microwave stand for Jodie’s sister.
On weekends, he was often hired to photograph weddings, bar mitzvahs and birthdays, a sideline he had gotten into when he was 13. It suited him well. “He wasn’t really able to sit still,” said Mrs. Goldberg. “He had to go from place to place.”
Having a first baby, Mrs. Goldberg said, was in their “five-year plan.”
Mr. Goldberg, who worked at Fiduciary Trust, would have turned 27 today.
Thomas J. Fisher
Carving the turkey. Slipping out for a round of golf. Taking his wife and three children to a Britney Spears concert. Not to mention working, as a vice president for operations at Fiduciary Trust Company International. How did Thomas J. Fisher, 36, get it all done?
“The Bible says God created our world in seven days,” Mr. Fisher’s brother-in-law, Chris O’Donnell, said in his eulogy. “I think Tom could have done it in six and still gotten 18 in along the way.”
The Fisher family had the most meticulously mowed lawn in their Union, N.J., neighborhood, and Mr. Fisher insisted on painting the house himself. Twice. “He was on double ladders, hanging off a slate roof. I was panicking,” said Susan Fisher, his wife. “But he wouldn’t hire people to do things like that.”
Mr. Fisher was a planner. “Get it on the calendar!” he would cry when friends proposed a tentative get-together. And on the calendar it got. “He exhausted me,” said Mrs. Fisher, 38.
Now she is the one raking the lawn and shopping for groceries. “He left me with a three-month supply of paper towels,” she said. “And big shoes to fill.”
Eddie Wing-Wai Ching
He was the Cool Man.
Outwardly, he always seemed so phlegmatic. He did not talk much. He did not reveal his emotions. If anything, when you spoke to him, he would send you a stern look. But inside, Eddie Wing Wai Ching was the exact opposite — all warmth. So his family nicknamed him Cool Man.
Since Mr. Ching, 29, was the youngest of four, his relatives also liked to call him Ah- B, Chinese for baby. In truth, though, he was mature beyond his years. He had clear-cut goals of owning a home, establishing a successful career and raising a family. He had already bought a home in New Jersey when he was 27, and his intention was to propose marriage to his girlfriend by the end of the year.
As a client support administrator for UmeVoice, one of his clients was Cantor Fitzgerald, and he was at its office on Sept. 11.
To keep in shape, he liked to play basketball every week. His motto, on and off the court, was the old standard “Action speaks louder than words.” As his half-sister, Patricia Liu, put it: “You would ask him a favor and he wouldn’t answer you. But then he’d go ahead and do just what you asked him.”
Bella Bhukhan
Bella Bhukhan, 24, danced the part of the youngest with a certain spark. Of the three sisters, she was the most playful, the most stubborn, the bluntest – in a sense, the most western. Raised in a Gujarati family who settled in Union, N.J., after migrating from Zambia, she was the defiant one who returned from a Cancún vacation with a tattoo on her lower back.
Yet she also embraced her Indian heritage. At her eldest sister Vicky’s wedding last month, Bella performed a traditional Indian dance wearing a long brown and gold skirt, sleeveless top and jewelry that glittered and clattered.
With her engaging smile, Bella was a people-person. At the Cantor Fitzgerald memorial service, her family was struck by how many employees, especially the foreign-born, remembered how well Bella took care of them in the human resources department. That was the role this youngest sister assumed at home, too: “The three of us were best friends and she was very upset I was moving so far away,” said Vicky Tailor. “She always told my in-laws to take care of me and called every other day to see if I was being treated right.”
Wayne Alan Russo
Wayne Alan Russo never got to Egypt. He had been to China, Japan, Russia, all over Europe — he was planning his eighth trip to Italy for early November — and returned on Sept. 2 from India. But some sort of trouble always blocked the trip to the pyramids.
At home, he led an organized life. He gave blood several times a year, and supported a child in Africa. He took the bus from Union, N.J., where he lived with his parents, every morning at 6:30 to arrive early for his accountant’s job at Marsh & McLennan. He went to almost every Giants’ home game since Giants Stadium opened in 1976 with his father, Arthur Russo. And there were the Yankees. He and his family saw them beat the Red Sox on Sept. 8.
On Sept. 11 Mr. Russo, 37, was to have had dinner with Cheryl Marx, who had been in the group that went to New Delhi, Jaipur and Agra. They never got to exchange photos. But they did receive each other’s postcards, sent from India on that last trip. Each said “Egypt next year.” a.m. to 4:30 p.m.