Long-lost father died in rubble of trade towers

War on terrorism: Victims

A Virginia man who spent 13 years hunting for his long-lost father all across America has finally solved the puzzle of his disappearance. The quest, however, has ended in unexpected and wrenching tragedy – amid the rubble of the collapsed towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.

It was several days after the atrocities of 11 September when a reporter for The New York Times telephoned the home of Richard Penny in Norfolk, Virginia, with the news that his father was on the list of those killed or missing. His wife, Monika, took the call. She had to tell her husband when he got back from work.

"I could see something was up," Mr Penny, 33, recalled earlier this week. "She sat me down and said that my father had died. After all those years looking for him, I was just crushed."

Mr Penny's father, Richard Penny Snr, had been struggling for years – he went to prison in 1975 for 17 months for taking part in a subway token booth robbery – when, in 1987, he abruptly vanished from the small Brooklyn apartment where he lived alone. No one in the family had a clue where he had gone.

Locating his father became an all-consuming mission for the junior Richard Penny. He would even scour telephone directories from different American cities looking for every Richard Penny and calling them up. He never found his father or even received word of him until the day the newspaper called.

Though he has been robbed of the chance of meeting his father again, Mr Penny is finally able to find out what he was doing all those years. "I'm going to talk to as many people as possible who knew him to plug in the bits and pieces of his history," he explained. "I need to know."

The story that is slowly emerging is one of drifting and homelessness that suddenly turned for the better in 1998 when Mr Penny Snr entered a neighbourhood housing and employment programme in Manhattan. The agency found him a job – collecting paper to be recycled from offices in the World Trade Centre.

"He loved that building, he loved that job," said Khimo Pereyra, an assistant at the Grand Central Neighbourhood agency. Every day, Richard Snr would turn up at the World Trade complex at 8am and start his rounds on the upper floors of the north tower. Which is where he was when the first jet hit.