Victims include a 9/11 activist

A Sept. 11 widow-turned-activist who met with President Obama at the White House just last week. A human-rights official who was one of the world's leading experts on the Rwanda genocide. A Rowan University graduate and fund-raiser for Princeton University's athletic department. Two members of jazz musician Chuck Mangione's band.

They were among the 50 lives lost in Thursday's crash of Continental Flight 3407.

Beverly Eckert, 57, of Stamford, Conn., a onetime insurance executive whose husband, Sean Rooney, was killed at the World Trade Center in 2001, had become one of the most visible faces in the aftermath of the attacks.

Rooney, an Aon Corp. vice president, had been on the phone from the South Tower telling Eckert he loved her when suddenly there was a loud explosion and nothing more. "Now she's with him," Eckert's sister, Sue Bourque, told the Buffalo News.

Eckert had been heading Thursday to Buffalo, her hometown, for a celebration of what would have been her husband's 58th birthday, said Mary Fetchet, a 9/11 family activist. Eckert also had been scheduled to present a scholarship in her husband's name at his alma mater, Canisius High School.

Last week, Eckert was at the White House with Obama as part of a meeting with relatives of those killed in the 2001 attacks and the USS Cole bombing, to discuss how the new administration would handle terror suspects.

Obama paid tribute yesterday to Eckert, calling her "an inspiration to me and so many others."

Alison Des Forges, 66, of Buffalo, was the senior adviser for Human Rights Watch's Africa division. Considered one of the world's leading experts on the genocide in Rwanda, Des Forges testified at 11 trials before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Des Forges, who was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1999, was returning home Thursday from Europe, where she had briefed diplomats on the situation in Rwanda and Africa's Great Lakes region, said Emma Daly, spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch.

Lorin Maurer, 30, a native of Sinking Spring, Berks County, had worked raising money for Princeton's athletics department. She was flying to Buffalo for the wedding of the brother of her boyfriend, Kevin Kuwick, an assistant basketball coach at Butler University.

Two members of Mangione's band - Gerry Niewood, 64, of Glen Ridge, N.J., and Coleman Mellett, 33, of East Brunswick - were among those killed. The band had been scheduled to perform yesterday with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra at Kleinhans Music Hall. The concert was postponed.

Also lost were five crew members: the pilot, Capt. Marvin Renslow; the first officer, Rebecca Shaw; two flight attendants, Matilda Quintero and Donna Prisco; and an off-duty crew member, Capt. Joseph Zuffoletto.

Renslow, 47, who grew up in Iowa, lived in the Tampa, Fla., suburb of Lutz. He joined Colgan Air, the company operating the flight, in September 2005 and had flown 3,379 hours with the airline.

Neighbors said he had two children in elementary school.

Shaw, 24, had a passion for aviation and decided as a high school senior that she wanted to fly. A resident of Maple Valley near Seattle, Shaw had joined the commuter airline in January 2008 and flew 2,244 hours with it.

She leaves behind a husband, Troy.

Quintero, 56, of Woodbridge, N.J., was a breast-cancer survivor and had lost her husband to a heart attack, according to WCBS-TV. It said she had become a flight attendant less than a year ago.