Thomas E. Pedicini

Attached to His Guitar

Thomas Pedicini never strayed too far from a guitar. His brother-in- law Raymond Morace's earliest recollection of him is as "a skinny 13- year-old kid jumping around his room playing air guitar" to Van Halen. In his mother's last memory of him, he is teaching his 11-year-old cousin how to play, a few days before his death.

In between, Mr. Pedicini, 30, an easygoing sort and seemingly effortless golfer, studied business and had been working as a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald since 1998, a job he got through another brother-in-law, Mark Colaio, who died with him.

After Sept. 11, in Mr. Pedicini's apartment in Woodside, Queens, one of his roommates found a tape of him strumming and singing his way through some of his favorite tunes. "He was too shy even to show it to me, but I could hear him in there singing and playing so I knew he was up to doing something," said the roommate, Jordan Zed. He gave the tape to Mr. Pedicini's parents. More musical memories.

But Mr. Zed remembers Mr. Pedicini mostly as a decent human being whose life was going somewhere. "You'd sit around and talk about where you see yourself in five years," he said. "He had dreams and goals. He wanted to eventually find the right girl and settle down and have a family and work his way up in the firm. It seems so sad."