PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The Hotel Montana is a ruin. Five stories, 144 rooms, 50 apartments, restaurants and arcade all tumbled onto themselves in the space of 35 seconds one month ago today.

The body count is a mystery. Rescue crews won't have a census until they dig their way to the front desk and find the register of the hotel that was once the pride of Port-au-Prince.

Among the missing is Richard Bruno, a Clairton native who received his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh and went on to become a diplomat and, in his later years, a college professor.

He was there with another faculty member and a dozen students from Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., on a mission called Journey of Hope. The group worked at food distribution centers and some of the scores of orphanages that spread across Port-au-Prince.

Kelly Bruno, his daughter, an endurance athlete who has gained renown for competing and winning despite the loss of a leg when she was 6 months old, is going on with training for yet another competition, attending medical school, and remembering her father.

"My dad always pushed me despite the fact that I only had one leg," she said yesterday. "He wanted me to realize my potential and that I was still capable of so much."

She last spoke with him two weeks before the quake. It was a Sunday night and she remembers she "half-listened" as he told her about plans to take students to Haiti. Twenty minutes later, she recalled, she said goodbye to him, not knowing it was for the last time.

Dr. Bruno was the child of Italian immigrants. His father worked the mills in Clairton. After high school, he was accepted to Duke University. During his senior year, his father died.

"That's when he really made up his mind that he wanted to be a doctor," Ms. Bruno said.

After graduating the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, Dr. Bruno spent most of his life as an embassy doctor with the State Department. On his curriculum vitae, he lists one publication: helping his daughter write her autobiography, "Challenged on Both Sides of the Finish Line."

The family would sometimes visit Clairton when they were stationed in Washington. Most have since moved on to California.

The family last got together on Thanksgiving at a member's house in North Carolina. Ms. Bruno said her dad was the only one excited to get up at 6 a.m. for an 8-kilometer race.

Ms. Bruno finished well ahead of most. Then, she recalled, her father finally crossed the finish line, along with one of her sisters, elated.

"The best part of it was that he acted like he had just won the race," she said. "His arms were up the air and he had this huge smile on his face like he had just come in first. That's just who he was. That's how he lived his life."

Finding Richard Bruno, his faculty colleague, Patrick Hartwick, and four of the 12 students with whom they traveled to Haiti is a job that befell a joint task force of U.S., Canadian and Mexican troops who sealed off the Montana a day after it tumbled.

Four backhoes sit atop a mound of rubble already cleared from the top layer. Each shovelful is turned at least four times in the search for any sign of a human.

The main part of the recovery goes to rescuers who don helmets, shimmy through two-foot-high crevasses between the floors that pancaked onto each other, and use their noses.

"We're getting used to that smell," said Dez Desjardins, a Canadian Air Force rescue crew member. "The first few days it was a lot stronger. As they days go on it starts to dissipate. That's one of the tools we use."

On Wednesday evening, a team dropped into a shaft dug into the five-floors of hotel that crumpled onto itself in the Jan. 12 earthquake, and brought out Courtney Hays, one of the missing students.

Mr. Bruno and the other five remain missing.

The Montana was built in 1947 and was considered the height of luxury, in a very literal sense. It hugs the side of one of the mountains that rim Port-au-Prince. In the 63 years since it was built, the hotel was added to five times.

Rescuers say that on each of those occasions, builders used too little concrete and too much sand, the wrong kind of sand at that.

Mr. Desjardins described the rescue as akin to digging through clay. The only stiff resistance their tools meet is from the steel reinforcement bars.

To be honest, the smell is still there. It hangs across the hillside overlooking Rue Delmas. It wafts from the rubble that once blocked the vista and is now being carted off shovelful by shovelful. It comes from the jumbled pile and it comes from the arcade of shops, still recognizable as buildings, that stands just off what was the hotel entrance.

Richard Warren, a United Nations official, was one of those that escaped the arcade. He literally ran as it tumbled behind him.

"I've been through a lot of stuff before," he recalled. "It doesn't worry me. And I guess it worries me that it doesn't worry me."

He emerged from the remnants of the Montana's arcade and found himself standing on what had been the roof of a parking garage.

That tumble of geography, a sort of three-dimensional chess game, has made the search tricky enough. One technique is to construct a sort of empty elevator shaft that cuts through the few hollow places, then fan out laterally.

When a body is found, it is brought up. Sometimes they go back for personal effects to see if they will help identify the person.

"We're looking for ID -- wedding bands with inscriptions on them. Jewelry that would tip them off," said Lt. Cody Chiles, an army public affairs officer at the scene.

When the identity is uncertain, they take fingerprints, if possible, or check dental records.

Remains are moved down the hill to a tent run by the Army mortuary affairs unit.

An anthropologist is on site to help. One month after the quake, in the tropics, visual identification is unlikely.

The mercy, say Army First Sgt. Michael Swam, one of the crew leaders on the mortuary team, is that everything was quick.

"I haven't seen a sign yet that people suffered," he said.

As he spoke, a backhoe pulled up a mattress. There were no stains and it was dry, a sign, Sgt. Swam said, that they wouldn't find a body there.

Nonetheless, four soldiers stood around the hole and stared at the ground. Every load is inspected. Nothing is dropped into the waiting dump truck until they are sure a human isn't in the load.

"We're trying our hardest to retrieve everyone's family members," Sgt. Swam said. "With the utmost respect. We want to bring the fallen home."

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