Charles Antoine Lesperance

A Lesson for His Daughter

Charles Lesperance loved the good life, and he loved to learn. He was a pro at cooking salmon, had season tickets to the opera, and could take a computer apart and put it back together again. He had an M.B.A. from Columbia and enough credits for a second bachelor's degree.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Mr. Lesperance, 55, was supposed to marry Renee Alexander, whom his daughter described as "like the love of his life."

"I really tried to go about being as normal as I possibly could," Ms. Alexander said of that day. "I just didn't know what to do. I did not know what to do. I figured it's just a day; it'll come and go. But then his birthday was right after that. Holidays are very difficult."

Mr. Lesperance had spent his early childhood in Haiti, and he and Ms. Alexander enjoyed traveling to the Caribbean, especially St. Martin, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Martinique and St. Lucia. "We were always very at peace and comfortable back there," she said. "He wanted to go back to the blue water of the Caribbean. He loved it," she said of her fiancé, who had spent his early childhood in Haiti.

Nilaja Shealy, the second of his three daughters, remembers the lesson she learned from her father, who was a systems analyst with the State Department of Transportation. "The biggest thing that my father did, that anyone should try to do in their life, is to always improve, to always continually seek to be better," she said. "I think he did that."