Saturday, April 17, 2010

U.S. Ends Search for Last American Lost in Haiti Quake

Lonez Annoule's search for his 6-year-old daughter Lodz began minutes after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti. He was about to prepare to send the little girl, an American citizen, back home to Miami when catastrophe struck. Annoule was on his way back from his trip to sell used clothing in the southwestern city of Petit-GoÂve. His bus came to a halt because piles of dead bodies were blocking the road. "When I saw those bodies, I only thought of one thing - my daughter," says Annoule, 37. "I walked all night, nonstop, from 5:30 in the evening to 10 a.m., to reach her."Annoule covered about 35 miles in the darkness, with long spreads of silence and bursts of cries for help. As he approached his sister-in-law's house in the Port-au-Prince district of Carrefour Feuilles, each block no longer resembled what he remembered. And the four-story apartment building where he had left his daughter was flattened. "When I got to the house, I saw my sister-in law with her arms stretched out, and I knew," says Annoule, fixing his eyes on the ground.He hired neighborhood men to pull concrete blocks with their bare hands, looking for any sign of Lodz. They worked for two straight weeks. The search for the little girl was then turned over to the U.S. military's mortuary affairs, a unit that began looking for the remains of American victims of the quake in the beginning of March. The team has since recovered the remains of 52 Americans, but not Lodz's. This week, about 2½ months after the quake, it gave up....

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