U.S. Man Finds Daughter Amid Photos of the Dead

TOKYO —  The search for Kali Breisch is over. Her father, Stu, found a photograph of the 15-year-old Salt Lake City teenager in a grim catalog of the dead in Thailand, ending the anguished quest to learn his daughter’s fate.

Kali was among the hundreds of foreign tourists and Thais swallowed by a wave that crashed through resorts along the gently sloping sands of Khao Lak beach the day after Christmas. A sleepy Kali had been roused by the first sounds of the tsunami’s approach and was standing next to her brother Jai, 16, at the window of their rented beachfront bungalow when the full force of the water hit.

Jai survived, a testament to the random nature of a disaster in which survival or death was a matter of inches and chance.

Stu Breisch and his elder daughter, Shonti, 18, had searched for Kali ever since, scouring the beach, hospital beds and makeshift morgues.

Yet in death, Kali remained elusive.

Although Stu recognized his daughter’s face Monday in the photo taken by Thai forensic teams, the numbered body corresponding to the picture was not Kali’s. He will return home without a body.

“The Thais are trying so hard and the pathologist was terribly embarrassed, but it’s enough for me at this point,” Breisch said in a telephone interview from Khao Lak, where he continued to search for his family’s personal items before his return to the U.S. in a few days. “For me to see the picture gives me some sense of completion.

“It’s like Kali played the final trick on everybody,” he said. “We had the feeling all along that she did not want us to see her this way, not the girl who spent all that time every morning meticulously fixing her hair and getting ready for school.

“She looked surprisingly good in the photo,” he said. “Some facial injuries and a head wound. But nothing too awful.

“I like to think she hit her head and was gone before she had to swim.”