Desperate families turn to sticky notes seeking missing Maui fire victims

PAIA, Hawaii - The sticky notes began collecting on an easel outside the Lahaina fire evacuation center in Wailuku, Maui, as soon as it opened last week.

Each of the handwritten notes, maybe three dozen, had the names of people unaccounted for in the days after the deadly disaster, along with a plea to call their loved ones if anyone knew their whereabouts. Since then, many of the notes have gone unanswered - emblematic of a tense wait for news about who among a countless number of those still missing are dead or alive.

One of the notes at the Wailuku site bore the name of longtime resident Anne Curtis, an elderly widow better known within her extended family as Aunt Annie. Starting on Aug. 8, relatives in Alaska and New York stopped hearing from the 83-year-old fixated on taking care of her many cats. Their alarm only grew over time.

Aug. 8, when the fires began, was a Tuesday. Wednesday passed. Then Thursday came and went without a word.

“I cried all day Thursday,” said her niece, Judy Odhner, a cafe owner in Seward, Alaska, who got a Maui friend to post the sticky note about her aunt. “It was really scary.”

Curtis “doesn’t always make the right decisions because she’s constantly worried about her cats,” Odhner added.

While some victims who fell off the radar for a few days have since turned up, time continues to tick by with no word about other loved ones as authorities labor to find the missing and identify the dead.

Demonstrating the broad geographic range of the potential losses, Odhner has a friend in Alaska who has been experiencing the same agony. Theresa Waldron and her older sister, Sabree Koch, were tight growing up in Alaska - “best friends” as Waldron describes it. The younger sibling still has a black-and-white photo booth image of the pair from the 2000s, a keepsake that reflects the siblings’ bond in those days.

Time and distance, and now the deadly Lahaina wildfire, have altered the dynamic in a heart-wrenching way.

Koch, 40, who was homeless, was among those who are unaccounted for in the wake of the tragedy on Maui.

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For days Waldron, 38, clung to hope that her sister had survived, in part based on recent social media photos - apparently posted three days after the fire - that showed a woman resembling Koch wandering Lahaina’s streets with a shopping cart. But police, the Red Cross and Koch herself had not been able to provide any firm confirmation that she was still alive.

“All I can do is wait,” Waldron said in a phone interview from her home in Seward on Wednesday.

In February, Waldron set out to find her sister on a visit to the islands. She said she walked the streets of Lahaina for hours before finally discovering her, wearing an oversized T-shirt over her shrunken body.

“Thank you. I knew you would come,” Waldron said Koch told her. But Koch, as had been the case for years, was in no mood to be rescued. Waldron took a photo of Koch, trying to comfort herself by thinking, “At least I’ve seen her now. . . . It didn’t make it any better.”

The days moved on, fire recovery began, and finally, for Judy Odhner, there was good news. Curtis surfaced, calling another niece in New York to say she had been unable to make contact because cell service remained out in the burn zone. Property that Aunt Annie owned in Lahaina was destroyed, she told the niece, but she had been safe and sound at another property north of town.

“I am so lucky,” Odhner said.

But getting Curtis out of Hawaii is a long shot, Odhner said. “I never, ever think she’ll leave those cats.”

And then suddenly there was good news for Waldron, too. After this article was published Wednesday, a reader reached out with more video, showing tattoos that firmly identified Koch as a survivor.

Waldron is still trying to reach her sister. But she is alive.