In the Destruction, a Father's Trail of Tears

By Bruce Wallace

Dec. 30, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

KHAO LAK, Thailand — If he can just follow the trail of Kali’s belongings, if he can keep uncovering more of those shoes with the pointed toes she loves so much and the “Abercrombie and Fitch everything” that seem to make up her whole wardrobe, Stu Breisch believes, the sodden clues will lead to his missing 15-year-old daughter.

“My daughter is here someplace,” the Salt Lake City doctor says, convinced.

The place is a mess, though, a wasteland of shoe-sucking mud, toppled trees and smashed wood, accompanied by the odor of uncounted bodies still buried under the wreckage.

Breisch and his other daughter, Shonti, 18, are standing on a tiled floor of a beachfront bungalow that has been jarred from its foundations and tilts at a wild angle.

“We just want to go home,” Shonti says, tugging at one of her sister’s bathing suits she finds pinched between two blocks of concrete. “But we can’t go home without her.”

Kali was sleeping in the bungalow next to her brother Jai, 16, on the morning after Christmas when the tsunami hit the just-opened Emerald Resort on Thailand’s Khao Lak beach.

Jai is alive, having ridden the torrent of water and debris until the wave stopped its push inland and receded, mercifully without him. He’s in a hospital in Bangkok, where Sally Nelson, Breisch’s partner, watches over his recovery from a badly cut knee.

Breisch and Shonti are almost alone in this jungle of rubble. A few Thais drift past occasionally, snapping pictures and shaking their heads in amazement. But no relief workers are here to haul away capsized roofs or dredge the pools of stinking brown water on the beach. No police or soldiers have come to search for bodies or to test the long odds of finding survivors.

There is just a father and daughter, silhouetted against the destruction in their shorts, sneakers and hats, picking through the damage in search of anything familiar that might lead them to Kali.

Khao Lak may be the worst-hit beach in Thailand. The water swallowed everything -- people, beds, Jai’s precious Martin guitar -- and hurled it against any tree or building that stood in its path. Breisch, 53, is an emergency room doctor in Salt Lake City. He sees the dead on the beach and knows how vulnerable the victims were to massive trauma injuries, the water tossing them about like dolls until they hit something that didn’t give.

“But if my son made it, why not others?” says Breisch, who raised the children on his own after their mother died when they were young. “Why not Kali?”

So much was left to fate. Breisch, Nelson and Shonti had gone out early Sunday morning on a diving day trip, leaving Jai and Kali to sleep late. Jai was still recovering from an October car accident that broke his neck, though doctors had told him that he was free to remove his neck brace.

Jai still slept in the brace for comfort. It may have saved him.

He and his sister were awakened by screams outside their bungalow, Jai told his family. They pulled the curtain back, noticed water pooling on the patio in front of them, and were standing side by side when the big wave blew through the window and swept them away.

That was the last Jai saw of Kali. From the hospital, he told his father how the dark water hurtled him through the courtyard of the resort, past three-story hotel wings still under construction, until it dropped him just short of a barbed-wire fence.

This is the path Breisch and Shonti are following.

“We found our belongings right along this line,” Breisch says, and as he walks the route they find Kali’s possessions. More clothes, torn and caked in mud. A sandal.

Breisch sifts through the discoveries. He has trained as a shaman, believing in the ancient healing power of native societies as a complement to Western medicine, and he thinks Kali’s clothes will help lead him to her. This morning, he performed a shamanic ritual on the site of the bungalow with one of her shirts he had discovered on the beach.

He holds the shirt up to show a visitor, its right sleeve torn off and a tear through the front. “A rip where her heart would be,” he says softly.

“We’re a spiritual family,” says Shonti, noting that the children chose their own Sanskrit names. “Kali is a very, very powerful name, and it’s true: She can get her way anytime in our family. We should be able to feel her here.

“But we can’t seem to track her for some reason,” Shonti continues, her frustration showing in tears that swell in her eyes. “She’s invisible to us.”

Shonti has stepped on a nail sticking up from a board during the search and sits down to try to clean the small but bloody cut.

“I can’t help thinking she doesn’t want us to find her like this,” Shonti says. “My dad goes to the morgue every night to look for her, and the bodies are in terrible condition. Maybe she doesn’t want us to see her or remember her like that.”

Breisch is not giving up. The trail of the family’s belongings runs right up against a two-story building, where bed frames, linen, wine glasses and shoes have been pushed through the windows and are stacked to the ceiling in a twisted pile, looking like the detritus from the Titanic scattered on the ocean floor.

There is the odor of corpses again. “I know, I smell it,” says Breisch, his eyes narrowing. “That’s why I’m checking this place out.” He goes through the building room by room to see if Kali is among the tangle. It takes close to 30 minutes, but she’s not there.

“Is it absurd that I’m doing this?” he asks. He exhales deeply. “I can’t believe anyone survived this mess,” he says. “I’ve almost had enough.”

Breisch and Shonti have worked their way about 300 yards back from the sea, now mockingly placid. The sun is weakening, and they push on through denser foliage and deeper mud before darkness falls. But there is no more sign of anything belonging to Kali.

“I don’t think I can stay here much longer,” Shonti says, tramping carefully on the squishy ground. “You can smell bodies everywhere you walk. If she’s buried under this mud, she is not alive.”

Sunburned and starting to limp, Breisch also has had enough for today. “It’s getting creepy in here,” he says. “Like being in a graveyard at night.”

But as he has done every night since that first terrible day, Breisch won’t stop until he has visited a nearby temple being used as one of three morgues for the victims of Khao Lak. He and Shonti arrive after dark to see if Kali is among the new arrivals. Trucks are parked alongside one another on the temple grounds, loaded with hastily built wooden coffins. Police trucks wheel in, sirens on, stacked with more bodies.

The dead are laid out on the ground in several long rows. There is nothing to cool them, and their bodies have swollen and blackened grotesquely in the heat, limbs reaching skyward, faces decomposing. The smell hits the back of the throat.

Breisch pushes forward -- Shonti doesn’t join this part of the search -- through the anguished screams of those who have found loved ones. He approaches the forensic team of five young Thai doctors as they stand over the body of a man, taking his picture for their records and cutting away his clothes.

Breisch cannot face another night of walking the rows of the dead, looking for Kali’s face. He shows the forensic team her photo instead, and asks if anyone like her has been brought in tonight.

“Does she have any distinguishing marks?” they ask him kindly. “Scars?”

“No,” he answers.

“Tattoos?”

“No,” he tells them.

They look skeptical.

“It would help if she had marks. Are you sure she had no marks?” one asks.

“She’s my daughter. I know,” Breisch says. “She’s a 15-year-old girl. No marks.”

The doctor tells him they will have pictures of all the victims soon, maybe by tomorrow. Breisch can come and look at those. There also will be DNA testing, but that will take some time. Breisch thanks them and walks away.

“I just need to free her soul,” he says. He finds Shonti sitting in a chair nearby and tells her nothing has changed.

After a while she stands, favoring her bad foot. They are both limping, and put their arms around each other’s waist.

“Time to go home, Dad,” she says.

“I hear ya,” he answers.