Families still hoping amid search for missing

Remains of 114 people found after Maui blaze

LAHAINA, Hawaii — The days of waiting have become harder and harder as the odds grow longer and longer, but Kevin Baclig remains undeterred in his search for his wife and her parents, missing since Aug. 8 when a wildfire engulfed and flattened the Hawaiian town of Lahaina.

He has gone looking from one shelter to another, hoping strangers might recognize the faces on the flyers he brings with him. Baclig, 30, has driven back and forth to Lahaina, scouting for anything that might lead him to his wife, Angelica, and her parents, Joel and Adela Villegas. Six other relatives who lived next door also remain unaccounted for.

“I’m not going to give up until I see them,” he said. “Of course I’m hoping to find them alive. … What else can I do?”

Even as he tries to sound optimistic, his voice is subdued.

“I’ve been searching and searching — in Lahaina, everywhere,” Baclig said, speaking in Ilocano, a dialect of the northern Philippines.

The blaze took scores of lives and destroyed hundreds of homes, including the house Baclig’s family bought three years ago on Kopili Street, about a 15-minute walk to historic Front Street, once a bustling tourist center but now a bleak avenue of flattened buildings lined with charred vehicles.

The remains of 114 people have been found, most of them yet to be identified. Hawaii Gov. Josh Green has said the death toll probably will rise in the days to come as the search for remains continues in the heaps of rubble and ash in Lahaina, a seaside community of 12,000 and a tourist hotspot on Maui.

Officials acknowledge they don’t have a firm number on the missing.

Many initially listed as unaccounted for have been located.

Last week, Police Chief John Pelletier said authorities would do their best to track down the missing. “But I can’t promise that we’re going to get them all,” he said.

On the day before the fire, Po’omaika’i Estores-losano, a 28-year-old father of two, wished aloha to his ohana, the Hawaiian word for family. “Another beautiful day in Hawaii,” he wrote on Facebook, ending his post by urging his circle to “have fun, enjoy,” and to never be “unhappy and grumpy.”

He was among the scores still missing Saturday. His family has scoured the island looking for him, checking hospitals and shelters.

“We don’t want him to think we stopped looking for him,” said Ku’ulei Barut, who last spoke to her brother the day before he went missing.

His mother, Leona Castillo, wants to hang on to the possibility that her son is still alive, but she knows she may have to face a reality she is not yet ready to accept. Last week, as the talk of body counts intensified, she got herself swabbed for DNA.

She wants him found, no matter how and where.

“We don’t want him to be lost,” she said.

Jae C. Hong The Associated Press Two burned cars are seen next to a home destroyed in a wildfire Friday in Lahaina, Hawaii. The remains of 114 people have been found so far.