Utahns touched by tragedy are still on road to recovery

Margaret Wahlstrom and her daughter had just returned from London last month when she heard that terrorists were planning to blow up planes flying from England to the United States.

"It could happen again," Wahlstrom thought.

The "it," of course, is another terrorist attack like the ones on Sept. 11, 2001, when more than 3,000 people were killed.

Margaret's husband, Norman Wahlstrom Jr., lost his mother and sister in the 9/11 attacks that zeroed in on New York City.

On that day, Mary Alice Wahlstrom, 78, an avid reader and silent movie fan, and her daughter Carolyn Beug, 48, an accomplished musician, died after their American Airlines plane was hijacked by terrorists and flown into the first of two World Trade Center towers. The two women were returning from a trip to take Beug's twin daughters to Brown University in Rhode Island.

Of the 188 people who died in the Pentagon attack, two had relatives living in Utah. Killed were Rhonda Sue Ridge Rasmussen, 44, and Brady Howell, 26, an Idaho native.

Howell was working as a civilian watch officer for the chief of naval operations as an intern in the Pentagon when a hijacked plane plowed into the building.

"I think about losing Brady every day," said his mother, Jeanette Howell, from her home in St. George. "But I don't dwell on the bad parts."

Of Ken and Jeanette Howell's five children, Brady was the "life of the party," which is the way he was remembered at a recent family reunion in Centerville.

"Our children are sad and think it's terrible that so many innocent people were taken that day," Jeanette said. "But they have a peace about Brady."

Brady's wife, Liz, has not remarried and is currently serving a mission in Portugal for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"She's doing wonderful things," Jeanette said. "We're really proud of her."

The Wahlstrom family has also tried to navigate the bumpy road to recovery that began with tragedy five years ago.

Around the one-year anniversary of 9/11, Norman Wahlstrom Jr., a pathologist at Ogden Regional Medical Center, talked about how hard his mother's death was on his then-ailing father, Norman Wahlstrom Sr.

"She did everything for him, she just ran everything for him. That's been the saddest thing about the past year," Wahlstrom said in 2002. His father died earlier this year.