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11/03/02
Stephen Hudak and John F. Hagan Plain Dealer Reporters

The first generation of asbestos victims in northeast Ohio was shipbuilders, pipefitters and construction workers. Its latest generation comes from all walks of life.

FRED SCHMIDT
Age: 65

A grandfather and a steel sculptor, whose works brighten lobbies of banks and, coincidentally, the Ireland Cancer Center, Schmidt hoped he'd live long enough to see justice. But his cancer moved faster than his case against the companies whose products were suspected of causing it. Schmidt was still alive when his wife, Jane, took the stand last year in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. "He can hardly breathe," she testified. "He knows he's suffocating and he knows he's dying." Before she was done, he was dead. The judge declared a mistrial.

DEBORAH HAMMOND
Age: 44

Hammond never found out where she met her killer. "I was too busy trying to figure out how to beat it to figure out how she got it," said Rex Hammond, who had been her sweetheart since the fifth grade. Deborah died four months after she was diagnosed with mesothelioma. Her aunt, Ruth Forrider, died a year later of the same disease. Family members suspect both were exposed to asbestos secondhand. Deborah's father and Ruth's husband were brothers who worked as railroad mechanics in Lorain County, fixing train cars amid asbestos dust.

SISTER ALICE MARIE PAGAC
Age: 68

Nothing in a 47-year career in Catholic education ever pulled her out of the classroom until mesothelioma did. She taught second-graders in parochial schools across Northeast Ohio. The Vincentian Sisters of Charity in Bedford aren't certain where she could have inhaled asbestos. "She was cheerful to the last," said her sister Mary Catherine Pagac, also a nun. "But it must have been so very painful to make her give up her little kids."

CARL OLLICK
Age: 61