Friend: Missing American had 'zeal for life'

David Golovner

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(CNN) -- At least one American is missing and presumed dead following last week's terror attacks that killed more than 50 people in London, England. New Yorker Michael Matsushita, 37, is believed to have been caught in the explosion on a train near King's Cross station.

CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien spoke Tuesday with David Golovner, a childhood friend of Matsushita's and a spokesman for the man's family.

O'BRIEN: First and foremost, our condolences to you. I know this was your best friend, and you're now getting some really tough words from the London police. When you first heard about the bombings on Thursday, did you immediately think Michael could be in danger?

GOLOVNER: Honestly, when I first heard Thursday, I did not put two and two together for several hours, and I knew he was in London, but I mean, there weren't that many people affected in the sense ... it wasn't a sort of citywide disaster.

You know the odds of something like this happening to anybody you know are so slim. ... I was more worried about everything else. I wasn't going through sort of my checklist of everybody I knew who was in London that could be affected. It just didn't occur to me until much later in the day.

O'BRIEN: When did police notify not only you but also the Matsushita family that even though there is no body discovered yet, they believe Michael had been killed?

GOLOVNER: [Monday] morning, they came by the house where we're staying at and told us that they had gone through a process of elimination using the identification that they had from us of him, and it matched that up with the people who were in critical condition and still alive in the hospital, and they could tell us definitively at that point that he was none of those people. So it was early [Monday].

O'BRIEN: It's believed that he was in the King's Cross station, I understand. Do you know where he was going, where he'd be headed then?

GOLOVNER: Yes, he had just gotten a new job. He started at the beginning of the week. And he lived near a subway station that would have taken him to the King's Cross station where he would have been transferring to, I believe, the Piccadilly line. So he was right along -- his route to this new job would have been along the route that all of this happened, which is why when he didn't show up for work that morning and after it happened, the woman that he was living with started to get very concerned, and she started to try to figure out ways that she could find him.

O'BRIEN: Oh, gosh, just terrible, terrible timing really. No body has been recovered, and a lot of that, as you know, is because it's really dangerous still at King's Cross station there. They're having a hard time getting in there. That's got to be really difficult, not just for you, but of course as you mentioned his girlfriend, his family, too.

GOLOVNER: Yes. We -- I mean, we don't know -- we know less details about what happened probably than most people in the world at this point. We've just been really in a cave and [had] tunnel vision, and our questions have all been focused, you know, poignantly on whether or not he was alive, and now at this point, we're just waiting to find out if he was identified. So we did hear that there was a lot of problems with getting bodies out, and we've heard, you know, reports of other, you know, rats and other things that just it made it horrific.

But the information that we've gotten has really all been from the police. None of us has really spent much time watching the news. So a lot of grisly details are things that we'll probably be hearing over the next couple of weeks once we're better able to better process everything that's going on.

O'BRIEN: Michael is a guy you have known since the third grade. You know, it's interesting here because we've seen his picture, but we don't know a lot about him. Tell me a little bit about Michael Matsushita.

GOLOVNER: Yes, I met him, as you said, when I was in the third grade, he was in the fourth grade, and we grew up together. We grew up in the Bronx. Both of us went to public schools. We hung out in the neighborhood. He was really well-known in the neighborhood.

I mean, people -- anybody who grew up in the '80s in the northwest Bronx and hung out on the streets would have probably known him, and [he] went to John F. Kennedy High School, which is one of the larger high schools in the city, and he was the kind of guy that was, you know, I mean, imaginative, adventurous; he was always trying to bring people together.

He had like the kind of zeal for life that's unusual in most people. He could not be constrained. His father typifies him as a bronco. You could put him in a pen, and he'd find a way out. You know, [he] always sought out circumstances in life that were unusual and that would sort of enrich him and enrich the people around him.

So you know, he did a ton of different jobs. He was always sort of looking for the next thing in life, the next thing he could move on to, and he did this adventure-travel thing that's been talked up about a lot in Southeast Asia. He was born in Vietnam during the war in '68 and moved to the Bronx around '72 or so. And up until his sort of early 30s, he'd never really left the United States again.

And he decided at one point he just needed to see more of the world, so he went on a world tour, traveled around, went home to Vietnam for the first time in almost 30 years and then ended up in Australia, lived there for a while and then went back to Southeast Asia and then landed in London -- yes, just about a month ago.