Victims from Belgium, around world
Missing American couple identified as victims
BRUSSELS, March 27, (AP): Victims of the attacks on Brussels’ airport and subway included commuters heading to work and travelers setting off on long-anticipated vacations. In a city that’s home to international institutions including the European Union and NATO, they came from Belgium and around the world. Among the confirmed dead:
Belgian student Bart Migom was traveling from Brussels to Atlanta to visit his girlfriend when he was caught in the extremist attack on Brussels Airport.
Staff and students at the Howest college in Bruges held a service for him over Easter weekend after his death was confirmed.
Migom, 21, had called his girlfriend Emily Eisenman in Atlanta when he was on his way to the airport and had planned to send a follow-up message when he was about to board the plane. Eisenman told NBC News he had promised to keep in touch every step of the way on his journey to Atlanta. She said his last words to her were “I love you.”
She described being awakened in the middle of the night by a call from Migom’s family telling her about the extremist bombings.
A Facebook post by Lode De Geyter, the managing director at Howest, said Migom was a second-year marketing student.
Gigi Adam said her 79-year-old father Andre Adam died trying to protect his wife during the attack on Brussels airport.
Served
Adam was a retired Belgian diplomat who had served as his country’s ambassador to Cuba, the United States, the United Nations and other countries.
“His death has wounded us all forever,” Gigi Adam wrote on Facebook. “All his life he had worked towards the peaceful resolution of conflict in the world.”
She described her late father as “a cultured and cheerful man” who had met his future wife — “the love of his life” — on his posting to Cuba in the early 1960s. She said on Facebook that her mother had been hospitalized after the attack.
Gigi Adam said her parents had retired to southwest France in recent years.
“He was a loving father and an adored grandfather,” she said, asking for his family members to be given privacy. “We need to rest.”
A missing American couple have been identified as victims of the attack at the Brussels airport, according to their employers.
Justin Shults, 30, and his wife Stephanie Shults, had not been seen since Tuesday.
Her employer, Mars, Inc, said in a Facebook post Saturday evening that her family had confirmed that she and her husband died in the bombings at the Brussels airport. Justin Shults’ employer, Clarcor, had confirmed earlier Saturday that he died in the attack.
Justin Shults, originally from Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and his wife, a Lexington, Kentucky, native, graduated together from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. They were dropping Stephanie’s mother off at the airport and were watching her walk through security when the bombs went off, a family member said.
Justin Shults’ brother, Levi Sutton, wrote on social media Saturday that his brother “traveled the world, leaving each destination better than when he arrived.”
Patricia Rizzo’s family hails from a tiny town in Sicily, but she was as broadly European as they come.
Born in Belgium to a family originally from Calascibetta, near Enna, Sicily, Rizzo graduated from a Belgian university and worked for several Belgian companies as an executive secretary before joining European institutions in 1995.
The Italian Foreign Ministry con- firmed Friday that Rizzo, 48, was among the dead from the attack on the Brussels subway at Maelbeek.
“Unfortunately, Patricia is no longer with us,” a man who identified himself as Rizzo’s cousin, Massimo Leonora, wrote on Facebook. His final post capped days of anxious updates recounting his search of Brussels hospitals in hopes that Rizzo might have been among the injured.
“It’s difficult, but at least now we’re beyond this unending race against time to find you.”
Rizzo moved back to Italy from 2003 to 2008 to work as the assistant to the executive director of the European Food Safety Authority.