By DAVID USBORNE
A Virginia man who spent 13 years searching for his long-lost father across America has finally found him.
But the quest has ended in unexpected and wrenching tragedy - amid the rubble of the collapsed towers of the World Trade Center in New York.
It was several days after September 11 when a New York Times reporter telephoned the home of Richard Penny in Norfolk, Virginia.
The reporter was ringing to let Mr Penny know 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," said Mr Penny, aged 33.
"She sat me down and said that my father had died. After all those years looking, I was just crushed," he said.
Mr Penny's father, also Richard Penny, had been struggling for years.
He went to prison in 1975 for 17 months for taking part in a subway token booth robbery.
In 1987, he abruptly vanished from the small Brooklyn apartment where he lived alone.
No one in the family had a clue where he went.
Finding his father became an all-consuming mission for the junior Richard Penny. He would scour telephone directories from different cities looking for every Richard Penny and phoning them.
He never found his father or even received word of him until the day the newspaper called.
Although he has been robbed of the chance of meeting his father again, Mr Penny jun has been 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. I need to know."
The story emerging is one of drifting and homelessness that suddenly turned for the better in 1998 when Mr Penny sen entered a neighbourhood housing and employment programme in Manhattan.
The agency found him a job - collecting paper to be recycled in offices in the World Trade Center.
"He loved that building, he loved that job," said Khimo Pereyra, an assistant at the Grand Central Neighbourhood agency.
Every day, Mr Penny sen would turn up at the World Trade complex at 8 am and start his rounds on the upper floors of the North Tower.
That is where he was when the first jet hit.
- INDEPENDENT
Story archives:
Links: Terror in America - the Sept 11 attacks
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Trade Center rubble reveals one more tragedy
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