Year After Air Crash : Survivors of Cerritos: No Easy Answer

He’s not the take-charge guy he used to be. He cries more. He prays more. He dwells more on life’s what-ifs.

Like the moment the big jet fell out of the sky and crashed nose-first across the street from his house.

“What if I’d been outside, washing my car, instead of inside, in the back bedroom, watching a tennis match?” Ivan Medina asks himself again and again. “Suppose I’d seen this stupid plane come down--what would I do? Run inside and get my family? Run away? Get a heart attack and die?”

As it was, Medina, his wife, their 3-year-old son and a niece escaped the terrible flames and explosions that consumed their house and everything they owned.

Gnawing Questions

But a year later the questions with no answers continue to gnaw. Why me? What now?

Often, unable to sleep, Medina gets up at 2 or 3 in the morning and walks through the house he has rented since last October, a few miles from the spot where his family’s life was blown apart. He lights a cigarette--a habit he’s fallen back into after 17 years of abstaining--and compulsively checks the house for escape routes. Just in case it happens again.

Medina, a 42-year-old auto agency finance manager, used to live in one of the 10 homes that were obliterated in the seconds after Aeromexico Flight 498 plowed into an attractive, upper-middle-class neighborhood in Cerritos at 11:52 a.m. on Aug. 31, 1986.

The crash, caused when a single-engine Piper Cherokee struck the DC-9 as the jet approached Los Angeles International Airport, killed 15 people in four homes, all 64 aboard the jetliner and all three in the Piper.

Brutal Impact

Lawns and streets were littered with often unrecognizable pieces of bodies, intermingled with equally unrecognizable parts of the orange-colored airliner. On roofs and in flower beds, rescue workers gingerly placed the remains of passengers in bright yellow body bags. So brutal was the impact that, despite the use of high-tech equipment, the county coroner’s office was unable to positively identify 12 of the Aeromexico passengers and one of the residents.

In the year since then, more slowly than was anticipated, a new neighborhood has arisen.

Last November, Wayne and Sue Nelson, whose Ashworth Place home suffered the heaviest toll of the eight that were damaged but not destroyed, moved back in. This month, workmen finished the first two complete rebuilding jobs: On Holmes Avenue, close to where the jet’s 50-ton fuselage fell, a new family moved into a rented home on the spot where five people died. Across the street, next door to Ivan Medina’s still-vacant lot, Doug and Ann Fuller, who’d been out sailing when the plane crashed, came back.

“We’ve been spread out so long, it’ll be kind of like a reunion,” said Doug Fuller, an engineer who moved in four years ago.

Nearby, surrounded by bags of concrete and wheelbarrows, workmen are applying finishing touches such as garage-door trim to two houses on Holmes and Reva Circle, fitting windows into the completed frame of another home and hammering the last rolls of tar paper over the frame of a fourth. Scattered in between the work are four vacant lots.

Were it not for some scars on the asphalt left by the impact of jet parts, the neighborhood might be mistaken for just another new tract.

Much the same might be said about the people who survived the crash, or those who lost loved ones aboard the jet. Except here the scars are harder to see--and much deeper.

$180,000 Disaster Fund

It’s not merely the loss of kin or friends. It’s also the loss of a place and possessions, of roots, of having to live through a cliche so easily spoken but rarely experienced: lost everything. No one has gone without food, shelter or many offers of counseling--a $180,000 disaster fund sponsored by the City of Cerritos and a well-coordinated psychological care program run by county mental health officials have seen to that. But for the people who were closest to the crash, by geography or family, life has been robbed of much of its balance. Many survivors still wobble.

“I used to be a stronger person,” said Ivan Medina, who plans to rebuild on Holmes but has yet to get started. “I used to say, ‘That’s the way it’s going to be.’ I’m not the same.

“I see the change at work,” where he’s supposed to negotiate the highest possible price for car deals. “Sometimes when I have a customer in front of me I start thinking a little weak--thinking like the customer, not like a finance manager.”

Wes Neally, whose family lived two doors away from the Medinas and escaped with them in a frantic hunt for a path to safety, knows the feeling.

Neally’s family has new furniture, new clothes, new cars--so much new stuff they sometimes feel guilty--but none of it can overcome the lingering dread.

“At night, when the house is dark, I’ll remember what I could see from our garage when the plane hit,” said Neally, a 40-year-old Los Angeles County weights-and-measures inspector.

“I could see into our kitchen, and there were white balls of flashes. I see the flashes. Or sometimes I remember those little kids.”

‘Never Goes Away’

The little kids--4, 5 and 8--were across the street. They were the children of Laura Rickard and Xochiquetzaltzin Cronkhite. Rickard and her boyfriend were moving into the house. They’d rented it the day before. Cronkhite and her husband were helping them. Rickard’s boyfriend and Cronkhite’s husband went to pick up the last load. A few minutes later, from his garage, Neally noticed the kids and one of the mothers, relaxing with a soft drink. A few minutes after that, the plane fell. The women and the children died.

“I start thinking about that and I start scaring myself,” Neally said. “You can’t explain what’ll set you off. The scariness never goes away.”

Like many of those who lost their homes, Neally and his wife, Carmeen, 39, constantly remind themselves how fortunate they are compared to the people aboard Flight 498.

“Their terror had to be a hundred times worse than ours,” Wes Neally said. Then he softened his voice. “Only they don’t have to live with it.”

He recognized that, to some, he sounds on the verge of self-pity. He took pains to explain.

“When you’re sick, I don’t care how sick, when you go home you’ll feel better. But when something like this happens to your house, with you in it, you lose all sense of security.”

So do your children.

Daughter’s Tears

One evening a couple of months ago, the Neally’s 9-year-old daughter, Reanna, was crying in her bed. Her parents couldn’t figure out why. Slowly, they realized she had seen a newscast about an airliner that had crashed on a Mexico City freeway that week, killing 54 people.

“You told me that crash would never happen again,” the girl said through her tears.

A month later, Sue Nelson was talking about a cruise the family would take in several years. She mentioned they would fly to their departure point. Her 8-year-old son, Robbie, who had watched the Aeromexico plane spiral down as he stood in his front yard, overheard her.

The next day, Robbie’s mother heard him telling someone matter-of-factly, “Well, I only have three years to live.”

Long after the funerals and the insurance payoffs and the title transfers and the first Christmases have been endured, a feeling of incompleteness still plagues the survivors.

They need to let the memories fade, to allow their grief to evolve into a private matter, but the reminders are everywhere. Not a day goes by without a newspaper or television story about air safety, and few such stories go by without reference to Cerritos.

“You know what they’re talking about--who died, who you’re not going to see anymore,” said Robert Cole of Spokane, Wash., a lifelong friend of William Kramer, the 53-year-old pilot of the Piper Archer that strayed into restricted airspace and collided with Aeromexico Flight 498. Kramer and his two passengers--his wife and one of their five children--died.

The survivors figured August would be a difficult month because of extensive publicity about the anniversary. But it has been worse. Two weeks ago they had to relive the nightmare when Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashed on takeoff in Detroit, killing at least 155 people.

Denise Guzman got a phone call about it at her home in Whittier, where her family was having a barbecue, the same kind of barbecue that had been planned--and then abruptly canceled--the day Aeromexico Flight 498 went down, with Guzman’s father-in-law and four other in-laws on board, returning from a Mexican fishing trip.

“When I heard about this one I got weak and started to flash on what had happened in Cerritos,” Guzman said. “It really hit home. Everybody was crying. We felt sorry for the people because we know what’s ahead of them.”

The pain transcends news reports. One woman who lives near the crash site told of telephoning a government agency to make an appointment and having the clerk, upon hearing her address, ask if that’s where the plane went down. Another woman telephoned a restaurant to make a reservation and, upon giving her distinctive last name, heard the maitre d’ ask whether she was the one who had family on the jet.

Gawkers Still Come By

On a recent Tuesday evening, just back in his newly built home, Doug Fuller looked out of his living room and saw another eternal nuisance, the gawkers, the strangers who still drive up and down the block, still curious, still gesturing from their cars. There , they say. That’s where it happened.

“Thirty, 40 of them on a Saturday or Sunday,” Fuller said, long drained of astonishment. Within the next five minutes, two more cars driven by strangers passed by.

The survivors, particularly the ones who were in the neighborhood when the plane hit, need to share their feelings, but so few people can grasp the magnitude of what they saw.

“I talked to a woman who lived in Germany during the war. She remembered the bombing raids. She started crying when she described it. That’s as close as anyone has come to understanding,” Wes Neally said.

The survivors have curiosities that they hesitate to share for fear of sounding ghoulish.

Need to Know

Guzman needs to know what her relatives experienced in the approximately 22 seconds between the midair collision and the crash a mile below. Where were they sitting? Did they see the Piper? Did they feel the collision? Did they pass out while the plane plummeted? Did they die immediately? The coroner’s office says everyone on the Aeromexico jet did die on impact, but Guzman can’t help wondering whether they had to experience the fire, too.

“If it was a car crash, or cancer, you’d know how they died,” said Guzman, a 33-year-old beauty salon owner who puts much of her spare time into phoning relatives of air crash victims throughout the country and who recently leased a building to establish a counseling center for relatives and friends of people who die in airplane accidents. “My questions, nobody will ever answer.”

Two or three times a month, Sue Nelson digs out newspaper stories of the crash and her parents’ videotapes of television newscasts. She cannot explain her hunger. All she knows is that she has to relive the moment when she and her husband were sitting down to lunch and a high-pitched whistle turned into a deafening roar and Robbie ran up the driveway and yelled that a plane was falling.

‘Blank Spots’

“I have these blank spots,” she said. “I keep trying to imagine what the plane looked like when it fell. In a way, I envy Robbie, because he saw it. . . . I all of a sudden find myself back on that day. I have to pinch myself to get out of it.

“You go, ‘Oh well, it’s been a year later and everything’s back to normal.’ Well, it’s not. . . . It might as well be a week later. . . . I can’t get over how in a tiny fraction of a second we were spared.”

Nor can she get over how, perhaps 50 feet closer to the impact point, the family of Frank and Theresa Estrada was not spared. Half the family--Frank and two teen-age children--were killed. When Sue Nelson thinks about this she feels guilty, because it makes her remember that she was not a particularly good next-door neighbor.

“There were a lot of children living there and I was not real tolerant about the noise,” she said. “After the crash, I didn’t feel like I was one of the good guys.” Like all survivors, she had to confront the question of whether there was a reason she lived and they died.

“I’ve come to the conclusion there was a God up there, but he wasn’t picking or choosing,” she said, sounding at peace with her answer. “This was an accident.”

Like Combat Stress

Dr. Patrick O’Connor, head of the county’s Rio Hondo Mental Health Center in Cerritos, and the man who led an effort to offer counseling to all of the city’s residents immediately after the crash, said such reactions are part of the post-traumatic stress syndrome that affects many combat veterans.

Unlike war veterans, the people of Cerritos were not expecting to be attacked. They live in a beautiful, well-planned, insulated community of 55,000 with lush, tree-lined greenbelts and tracts surrounded by tall, protective walls, a texture more akin to neighboring Orange County than Los Angeles.

“People get off the freeway and get in those yards and they’re safe,” O’Connor said. “But all of a sudden this secure place is invaded. People are saying things to themselves like: ‘It shouldn’t have happened to us. We spent our whole lives getting here and now an airplane drops from the skies and no place is safe.’ ”

San Diego Experience

Marilyn O’Hair, a San Diego disaster-intervention counselor who worked closely with survivors of the 1978 PSA crash that killed 144 people in that city, said she believes that extensive and early “outreach” work done by mental-health counselors in Cerritos will limit long-term effects of the crash.

O’Hair, former chief of community outreach for the San Diego County Department of Mental Health, said that as long as 2 1/2 years after the San Diego crash, “we were seeing people who we hadn’t seen before who were saying, essentially, ‘I can’t go on with this (memory of the crash), it’s interfering with my life too much.’ But it doesn’t go away. They have to integrate it into their life.”

Such burdens fall just as heavily on some of the hundreds of people who are called to work at the scene of an air crash, O’Hair said.

For Lt. John Anderson, commander of a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detachment deployed in the neighborhood a few minutes after the crash, there are images that still won’t fade.

Vivid Image

“The scene to this day that bothers me the most--and I’m starting to think of it more, now, with the anniversary coming up--was the (lowered) garage door with a perfectly square hole in it,” Anderson said. “It was right across the street from our command post. . . . We were there for eight days. . . .

“I was informed at the time that it was a stewardess who had come through that door. Her seat had cut that hole. You couldn’t have taken a saw and cut a neater hole. . . . I stared at that hole, and for a lot of nights after that, I dreamed about that hole.”

There were also the tennis shoes. “Three little tennis shoes, size 2 or 3,” Anderson said. “You can imagine who those belonged to. Little tennis shoes. Little stuffed dolls. You want to blank those out of your mind. You don’t want to see those anymore.

“We had a debriefing, one of the best things our department has ever done,” he said. “There was a psychologist, Dr. Audrey Honig. She told us, ‘You’re going to have periods when you’re depressed. . . . It’s natural. Don’t let it bother you. . . .’

Many Affected

“You sit there and you say to yourself, ‘I’m not going to say anything, ‘cause I’m OK.’ Then you hear the guy next to you saying, ‘I haven’t slept for three days.’ And you all begin to realize, ‘Them, too.’ What you get out of it is you realize that it’s OK to feel this way. . . .

“I know now that any anxiety I feel in the next two weeks, well, there will be feeling there, because I feel sorry for a whole lot of people--not only the victims who died, but a lot of very, very nice people who suffered greatly and probably still are suffering today.

“At least I know it’s OK. Audrey said it’s OK. That’s nice to know. Otherwise, it could drive you nuts real quick.”

Karl Grundmann, an air traffic controller who was on duty at the Terminal Radar Control Center at Los Angeles International Airport on the Sunday when the collision occurred, said controllers shy away from too much remembering.

Out of Mind

“If someone’s talking about Aeromexico, that subject gets changed real quick,” said Grundmann, who was on duty when Walter White, the controller responsible for guiding Flight 498 into LAX, turned to a supervisor and calmly reported, “Russ, I think I’ve just lost an airplane.”

“It’s something that happened. It was tragic,” Grundmann said. “But the potential for that accident to happen exists every day, and you don’t want to think about it.”

Nonetheless, Grundmann said, when he’s working on a Sunday, and he happens to look out over the traffic control sector in which Aeromexico was flying that day, “I still think about it.”

Barry Schiff, a Trans World Airlines captain, said pilots are even more taciturn.

“We don’t talk about it,” he said. “It’s an event. It happened. It’s over. We forget it. . . .

“Airline pilots are used to having accidents occur. You can’t let your job be affected by them. We don’t get emotionally involved. Maybe it’s a form of self-protection.”

When all the rebuilding and moving-in is finished on Holmes Avenue, Reva Circle and Ashworth Place, the majority of the faces in the neighborhood will still be the established ones.

Through sheer chance, the plane landed most directly on homes that were rented by people who had not been in the neighborhood long--the Estrada family, the families of Rickard and Cronkhite and the extended American Indian family of Howard Yackytooahnipah, which lost six members.

The only longtime homeowner who died was Linda McIllwain, who lived on Reva Circle with her husband, Dennis, and their son and daughter, Jeff and Debbie. Both children were out of the neighborhood at the time of the crash. Dennis McIllwain left to visit his sister nearby only 10 minutes before the crash.

Loss Still Felt

Dennis McIllwain plans to move his family back when his house is ready, probably within months. His wife’s death is still mentioned by several families in the neighborhood as one of their most heartbreaking losses.

“We feel bad whenever there’s a school function,” one woman said. “You always saw Linda there.”

“I’ll be driving along,” said Cerritos City Councilman Don Knabe, a close friend of the McIllwain family who took in the McIllwains during much of the last year, “and then all of a sudden something will flash and I’ll see Linda’s smiling face.”

Knabe has been torn by the burden of having to play incompatible roles. As the city’s mayor at the time of the crash, he had to uphold a strong, optimistic public image and quickly plunge into hundreds of logistical details for the neighborhood’s recovery. Privately, he was crushed. Linda McIllwain was the wife of the man Knabe refers to repeatedly as “my buddy.” She baby-sat for the Knabe children. The Knabes and the McIllwains traveled together on vacations.

Dual Involvement

“The hardest thing to deal with was the duality of my involvement,” he said. “The leadership role and also knowing so closely somebody who didn’t make it out.”

Of the six families whose homes were destroyed without loss of life, five plan to move back.

The exception is Wes Neally’s family, which moved into the tract when it was built in 1971. The Neallys, who have spent the last year in a rented home in Cypress, have bought a home in Yorba Linda, about 15 miles east of their old neighborhood, and plan to move in by November.

They could never again find peace in Cerritos.

It wasn’t simply the material loss--the home where all three children had been born, where every memento from baby books to Dad’s high school football clippings were destroyed.

It was the terror Wes Neally felt standing at the garage refrigerator when the crash came, seeing the explosion and not knowing where the others--Carmeen, daughter Reanna and Reanna’s friend, Diane--were in the house.

Race for Life

It was the hellishness of fire and debris tearing off the roof of the two-story home, of scurrying around, looking for his family, of wearing only swimming trunks and being scorched by burning jet fuel from the air, of looking down and seeing his arm on fire--burns that would cost him seven weeks of work.

Neally finally found his family in the backyard, trapped. Their street was a wall of flame and their backyard brick wall, which faced Carmenita Road, was too high to allow them to climb to safety.

Neally led them out. Using a table they climbed the fence into the Fullers’ backyard. The wall to Carmenita was still too high. They pushed through a lath fence into Ivan Medina’s backyard. There was Medina, with his wife, Fanny Patricia, his son, Ivan Jr., and his wife’s niece. They, too, were stuck. The Medinas had lived here two years, but this was the first time Ivan and Wes had met.

Medina helped the Neally family climb into his yard. Together, the eight pushed through the lath fence on the other end of Medina’s yard, into the next home. There they were finally able to pull each other over the fence to Carmenita and safety.

That was not the end of it. Two of the Neally children, Rochelle, 15, and Ryan, 12, were out of the neighborhood. By phone Rochelle heard about the crash, but was given the impression her house had not been hit. She headed for the neighborhood, turned a corner and found . . . nothing.

‘Totally Violated’

“We all just feel,” Neally said, groping for the right words, “like we were totally violated. Totally destroyed.”

Theresa Estrada has already tried to come back to Cerritos. It didn’t work.

When the plane crashed, Estrada was out shopping to make a special lunch for her husband, who’d been working grueling hours as a Southern California Edison repairman. The crash killed him, their daughter Angelicia, 14, and their son, Javier, 16. Miraculously, it spared Angelicia’s twin brother, Alejandro, who somehow pushed through the rubble that fell on top of him. Another son, Frank Jr., now 19, was away water-skiing.

The mother first moved her family to the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista, to be near her parents, brother and two sisters, who live in the San Diego area.

Missed Friends

After several months, it was clear that Alejandro and Frank Jr. were lonely for their friends in Cerritos.

“We moved back, but for me that just made it worse,” Estrada said.

They rented another house several blocks away from their old one, but their trips often took them down another part of their old street. Encountering friends and former neighbors was wrenching.

“People would see me and turn the other way, like they felt I was bad luck, or diseased,” Estrada said.

She decided to leave Cerritos when the boys finished school in June. She did not know where to go.

“We were like three lost souls,” she said.

Finally, she returned to Chula Vista and, with her parents, rented a two-story town house in an attractive housing development. Furniture and financial donations from her church and other sources helped her get settled.

Money Worries

She was expecting a pension from her husband’s employer, but it was held up. No positive identification of Frank Estrada had been found amid the debris. The coroner’s office would not issue a death certificate. The family had to go to court to get one. It did not arrive until July.

A few weeks later a reporter from a Long Beach newspaper was wrapping up an interview in Estrada’s home. She made a telephone call to her office and returned to tell Estrada that the Cerritos City Council had voted to allocate $25,900 of the city’s crash-victims fund to Alejandro and Frank Jr. It was more than twice the size of any other grant made from the fund.

Estrada looked back impassively.

“You don’t seem moved, “ the reporter said.

Estrada took a breath.

“I’m gratified,” she said. “But money is not important to me. Getting through the day, seeing my sons happy, that is important. No amount of money can replace the people we lost. Nothing can replace not being able to hold them every day.”

Theresa Estrada knows that, back in Cerritos, the talk among some neighbors is that her life is shattered and that she’s having a tough time of it. As a minister who is close to the family put it, “I have walked through many valleys with people, but never have I walked through anything that is so tragic.”

Estrada will hear none of it.

“The heartache is always there, the loneliness is always there. But the strength my family here has given us, their love, has gotten us through,” she said, carefully maintaining her delicate composure. “God has showered us with love.”

AIR SAFETY SINCE THE CERRITOS AIR CRASH

In the first 11 months after the Cerritos air disaster, pilots flying over Los Angeles County reported 64 near-collisions, 20 more than were reported in the 12 months before the crash.

How much this 58% increase in the number of near-collisions reflects the safety of the skies since the crash is questionable. The factor that is hardest to measure is the willingness of pilots to file near-collision reports with the FAA. There is general agreement that since the crash pilots have been more inclined to file reports.

A sharper increase in near-collisions was reflected in recent FAA statistics. The FAA said it counted only those incidents in which one or both planes were observed by air traffic controllers. In Los Angeles, where there are 8,000 takeoffs and landings each day, there were 51 of these incidents between Aug. 1, 1986, and July 31, 1987, contrasted with only 14 in the previous year.

Of the 51 incidents, eight involved “critical” situations in which a

collision was avoided by chance. Another 24 were classified as potentially hazardous, meaning that a collision might have occurred if neither of the pilots nor a controller had taken action.

NEAR-COLLISIONS BY LOCATION

Location 1985-86 1986-87 Los Angeles 8 9 Santa Monica 7 5 Palmdale 5 3 Burbank 4 8 Long Beach 3 10 Van Nuys 3 9 Seal Beach 1 4

NEAR-COLLISIONS BY AIRCRAFT

Reporting Plane/Other ‘85-6 ‘86-7 Airliner/Private Plane 17 23 Private Plane/Private 15 12 Private Plane/Military 4 0 Airliner/Airliner 4 0 Private Plane/Airliner 2 0 Air Taxi/Private Plane 0 5

MIDAIR COLLISIONS

In California during the last year there have been eight midair collisions, killing seven and injuring three. The fatal crashes involved two private planes that collided over Oakland on March 31, killing three people, and a May 22 collision over Tehachapi, between a private plane and an Air Force jet, killing four people.

A breakdown of midair collisions in the United States during the 12-month periods before and after the Cerritos crash:

Total Producing Total Total Year Collisions Fatalities Deaths Injuries ‘85-’86 27 16 42 30 ‘86-’87 26 13 48 8

CONTROLLER ERRORS

Computers at FAA air traffic facilities automatically record when two airplanes under the guidance of controllers come closer than the FAA believes is safe. This margin of safety is far greater than the limits by which near-collisions are defined. These are operational errors at each Southern California facility from Aug. 1, 1986, to July 31, 1987, and how they compare to the previous 12 months:

Facility 1985-86 1986-87 Palmdale* 50 68 LAX Approach 8 1 Coast Approach 4 4 Burbank 4 9 Ontario 5 1 4-State Western-Pacific Region 172 168

* Handles all high-altitude traffic in Southern California.