Wanting
to Hope, Dreading the TruthDennis Duggan
September 27, 2001 For the family of 21-year-old Tommy Ashton, who died in the World Trade Center tragedy, the moment they had all been dreading came Sunday evening.
Until then the tight-knit Woodside family clung to the hope that Tommy might still be alive. "It was a really hard, heart-wrenching time because none of us wanted to give up hope," his mother, Kathleen Ashton, said yesterday in the living room of her fifth-floor apartment in Woodside.
"John and I had been talking quietly up till then, not wanting our daughters to get upset," she said. "But we knew the time had come to talk about it. We also knew no one in authority was going to make the call and so we had to."
Her husband, John, a 46-year-old New York City Housing Authority manager, who spoke with emotion and often through tears, said his parish priest, Msgr. Joseph Finnerty of St. Sebastian's Roman Catholic Church, had helped him to come to accept his son's probable fate.
"We didn't want to give up hope," he said, "and it was hard, and Msgr. Finnerty was kind and gentle. He put the face of reality on it. He told us that we didn't have to make any decision until we were ready."
John Ashton said he was in his Long Island City office when the planes crashed into the towers. "I could see the fire in the first building," he said. "I panicked. I tried calling my son on his cell phone number. But I couldn't reach him. It was probably in his backpack."
Then he called his wife, a nurse who specializes in malpractice cases and who was then at Maimonides Hospital in the Bronx.
That same day, the Ashtons, their daughters, Colleen, 25, and Mary, 18, Tommy's girlfriend, Jacqueline Crilley, 18, and her parents launched an exhausting and frustrating search for Tommy.
"He didn't work in an office in the towers, he was employed by a small midtown Manhattan electrical firm doing work on the 86th floor," Kathleen said, "and we didn't know if people were aware who he was.
" Like other grieving families who lost loved ones, the Ashtons called hospitals, posted pictures and talked to anyone they thought could help.
By Sunday they were exhausted. Even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was using words like "miracle" and "very, very little chance" when talking about the possibilities of finding survivors.
"We couldn't even grieve normally," Kathleen said. "We were stuck in the mud. We decided that we had to have a memorial for our son so that his friends and relatives could come together and celebrate his life."
But it was by far the hardest task the parents had ever faced.
"Usually, a doctor or someone in authority tells you that a loved one is dead. We didn't want to have to tell our daughters that, but we wanted them to talk to us and to reach some sort of consensus," Kathleen Ashton said.
The family talked and cried and held hands for two hours before they decided the chances of ever finding Tommy's body were all but gone.
The Ashtons are proud "Woodsiders." They have lived all their life in the star-spangled, patriotic community. John and Kathleen met when they were attending the grammar school at St. Sebastian's.
Tommy, a medal-winning swimmer at Archbishop Molloy High School, also met Jacqueline at the same grammar school. They have been going steady for the past six years.
They took me into their son's bedroom where a poster of Sen. John McCain hung over his bed. "That was his hero," John Ashton said. He showed me a photograph of Tommy's uncle, William Ashton, a retired Navy lieutenant standing next to McCain, who had autographed it.
"We don't have his body," he said. "But his spirit lives on and God is with him. My son had some questions about his faith but he never lost it and in the last few weeks he had been dropping into St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is near where he works."
There are anguished families who still hope a loved one will be found.
"We are not interested in death certificates," Jonpaul Casalduc said over the phone yesterday. His mother, Vivian, is missing.
And Juan Carlos Segarra of Bay Ridge said yesterday that his family is "somewhere between hope and denial" about the fate of his father, Carlos, 56.
Unlike the Ashtons, Segarra, an accountant, said he received a phone call from his father, a securities trader, the morning of the crash.
"He was on the 46th floor," Segarra said yesterday. "He said that he had heard a crash and that it might be a bomb.
"That was the last we heard from him."
Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc.