For relatives, a chaotic search for answers

They came to Miami International Airport with a question they were afraid to have answered.

Carrying babies and even herding dogs on a leash leashes -- their stoicism belying the chaos that suddenly had beset their lives -- friends and relatives of some of the passengers aboard ValuJet Flight 592 were quickly ushered past the ticket counter Saturday afternoon by Metro-Dade police and airport personnel.

Often walking arm in arm, finding strength in groups of three and four, they were led up back stairs seldom seen by travelers and ushered into a third-floor auditorium on Concourse B that in times such as these becomes the airport's crisis center.

"Please, my husband was on that plane. Please, my husband was on that plane," one woman repeated time and time again.

A ValuJet employee -- a woman who has been with the airline for just only a month -- waited just inside the auditorium door with the DC-9's passenger list. Some people would go no farther.

"They told us he was on the plane," Barbara Varcelo cried out as she and her mother spun around just inside the door. "But they haven't told us anything."

Barbara Varcelo's grandfather, Alberto Varcelo, 60, of Hialeah, had been flying to Atlanta.

Metro-Dade police crisis counselors and volunteers from the American Red Cross and Salvation Army awaited family members inside. They could offer coffee, soft drinks, sandwiches and cookies, and a bank of phones Ä but little the families could really use.

"The material things are being taken care of," said Metro-Dade Fire- Rescue Capt. Allen Brown. "They have food, diapers for the babies.

"They need information. They want to grieve, and that's what they're doing."

Alicia Marquez, an MIA airport spokeswoman, could do nothing more than watch as a man in his 50s learned (that his) wife had been aboard the plane.

"He was openly crying," Marquez said.

At any one time, a (A) couple of dozen people waited for any glimmer of hope they sensed would never come.

"We saw the pictures on television," one man said. "We know there's no hope."

There was no television in the crisis room.