Wrapped in tissue paper like fragile presents, items recovered from the burned-out remains of a Colgan Dash-8 turbo prop are coming back to those who lost loved ones on Continental Connection Flight 3407 last February.

In her Clarence home, Jennifer West opened a small gift box containing strips of burnt leather from her husband Ernie's wallet, and four perfectly intact pictures of the couple's 2-year-old daughter, Summer.

"Yet, his driver's license was burned in half," she said, wiping tears from her eyes as she was comforted by her friend Robin Tolsma, who lost her husband in the same crash that claimed 50 lives.

Ernest West, along with his friend Darren Tolsma, traveled the world for Northrop Grumman and was proud of his collection of virtually indestructible luggage.

That might explain why so many of his possessions were recovered from the Colgan airliner. But Robin Tolsma, who got back mostly scraps of her husband's clothes, has a treasure Jennifer West hopes she, too, will recover: her husband's wedding ring.

Next to her own wedding ring, Tolsma wears her husband's thin gold band that carries the inscription: "Forever, 8-29-86."

Saturday marked the 23rd year since Darren and Robin Tolsma married after meeting on a blind date.

For the first time, her husband missed their anniversary, as he will Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations, the graduations of his 20-year-old son, Darren, and 17-year-old daughter, Nikki, and all the other milestones in their lives.

"You talk to them, then hours later they're dead," his wife said. "We never had a chance to say goodbye."

Mark Rocco is a senior vice president of BMS-Global, a recovery company paid under a contract with the airline to find, clean and return items during personal visits to Flight 3407 family members.

"We took 55 truckloads of dirt from the site and sifted through it all," he said.

Rocco met with family members shortly after the crash, telling them what his employees would be doing. Company employees also met with family members, learning as much as they could about the victims, so they could return the items to the victims' families.

Cleaned and packaged

The items returned to the families by Global BMS have been carefully cleaned and packaged.

"It's not a present," Rocco said of the returned items, "but we don't want to make them look like it was thrown in a box."

"The first thing I asked for was his ring," Tolsma said. "It was sad, it smelled like jet fuel, it was emotional and a very, very sad day."

Family members of Flight 3407 have become a force to reckon with in the halls of Congress and the offices of the Federal Aviation Administration, pressing their demands for airline safety and new rules that might prevent future disasters.

But back home, they are still coming to terms with people who are no longer there, no longer part of their lives.

"I still in a way think he's coming back," Jennifer West said of her husband. They met when she worked at Northrop Grumman, handling security clearances for its employees.

Her daughter, who will turn 3 in October, is starting to ask about her father in a way that breaks her mother's heart.

"Where's my daddy, where is he?" she asks her mother.

"He's in heaven."

"Well, can I go see him?"

Jennifer West has put a small memorial bench on the side of her house, next to a poplar tree planted in her husband's memory. She told her daughter she can sit on the bench whenever she wants to talk to her father.

Jennifer West and Robin Tolsma had met only once at a Northrop Grumman company dinner before the February crash. They've since become the closest of friends. They discovered their husbands sat together, seats 4A and 4B, on the Colgan plane.

Tolsma, a defense engineer, and West, deputy director of business development, were working on a classified project for Northrop Grumman before their deaths. One of the topics was how to improve the chances for military pilots to survive air crashes.

Their wives have turned to each other to help survive without their husbands.

Other Flight 3407 family members have turned to support groups to help them get on with their lives since the crash.

Kathy Johnston, who lost her husband, Kevin, safety director at Henkel Corp., teamed with the Red Cross in Buffalo to form a Flight 3407 therapy group. Nearly 20 family members turned up at the group's last regular session.

She, along with West and Tolsma, said just being with other Flight 3407 family members helps them relax. They don't have to put up a public front. Each knows what was lost when that flight went down.

"No one else has any idea what's involved with someone dying in a plane crash," Johnston, a school nurse, said during an interview in her East Amherst home.

Online catalog

Johnston was disappointed in the recovery company's initial mailing. She got nothing that was her husband's and hopes his wedding ring is in the next batch of 45,000 items the company recovered and will soon post in a computer catalog to the families.

"I'd like to get his ring," she said, "but now I'll take anything. Even a piece of his shirt."

The first group of distributed items had some connection to the victims, said Rocco, the recovery company executive. The next group, he said, will be items that his crews could not connect to any of the 49 passengers aboard, or to the resident of the house who died.

Global-BMS will soon send a letter to family members, giving them a Web site address where they can search through the items to see what might have come from their relatives aboard the plane.

Jennifer West received dozens of items, including all her husband's credit cards, the money he was carrying at the time, even a camera that still had a memory card in it so she could print the last pictures he took.

She's put a strong air freshener inside each box.

"We call it the smell of death," Robin Tolsma said. "Smoke and jet fuel."

She has buried the scraps of clothing from her husband, including half a shoe and a sock missing a heel, in the backyard of her Lancaster home.

The two women met for four hours with the medical examiner. They were told each of the passengers died from the impact of the crash, and said

he confirmed it by saying that no lung tissue showed soot, meaning no one was alive when the plane caught fire.

Both women wear lockets containing small amounts of their husbands' ashes, parts of their bodies that were later identified.

Robin Tolsma earlier buried her husband's remains in Forest Lawn.

Tolsma has a chauffeur's license and convinced the funeral home director, who has become a friend, to grant a request.

"I drove the limousine," she said. "I told the funeral director, 'I want to take him on his final ride.'"

Tolsma laughs at the memory, but she's also close to tears at the oddest times.

"I was in Lowe's, and they played my wedding song," she said. "I was boohooing in the back of the store."

Avoiding air travel

Neither woman has flown since the plane crash.

"It's not that we're afraid to fly, but we just don't want to sit in a seat and think what they were thinking," Tolsma said.

"I don't want to experience the fear he must have felt, the claustrophobia," West added.

Tolsma went with her son and daughter to the Flight 3407 hearings before the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington. West, with her

toddler, stayed home.

Tolsma, unlike some other families, watched a simulation of Flight 3407's final moments, stopped just short of the plane's final plunge to the

ground.

It bothered her, she said, but it was nothing like the feeling she got when she later viewed a Buffalo News photograph of her daughter, Nikki, reacting to the simulation.

"I can never take that fear away," she said of her daughter's expression.

Neither woman blames either the pilot, Marvin D. Renslow, or the co-pilot, Rebecca Lynn Shaw, for the crash. In fact, Tolsma has e-mailed Shaw's mother several times.

But both women, along with most Flight 3407 families, believe Colgan never should have put such relatively inexperienced pilots at the controls.

"I blame Colgan 100 percent for the accident," Tolsma said.

After a News reporter and a photographer left West's home on Thursday, West and Tolsma stood outside and chatted.

"We both cried like babies after you left," she said later. "A Dash-8 flew overhead."