Cerritos survivors recall mid-air jet disaster
LandonEx
By Wendy Thomas Russell / Press-Telegram Staff writer
CERRITOS, Calif. -- Fifteen years, and the ghosts are all but gone.
There are no memorials or monuments, no plaques or relics. Nothing to remind a
visitor of the notorious plane crash that killed 82 people and ravaged a
suburban Cerritos neighborhood 15 years ago today -- on August 31, 1986.
Drive along Holmes Avenue, Ashworth Place or Reva Circle today, and you'll find
only impeccable streets and attractive homes. Front doors are left wide open
as residents wave and chat on the sidewalks out front. A cool, inviting breeze
rolls in as the sun slips below the trees.
Fifteen years, and residents have replaced most of their bad memories with
pleasant routine.
John Augustine removes an American flag from his roof. Paulett Browning loads
her 11-year-old daughter into the family's minivan for swimming lessons. Bob
and Judy Didlock take their evening stroll. And Linda Tolman sits down to a
home-cooked meal.
Fifteen years, and this is what remains.
Normality. Civility. Happiness.
"Ghosts?" Browning asks, as though she's considered that word a hundred times.
"No."
It was just before noon -- 11:52 a.m. -- on that fateful, life-changing Sunday
when an Aeromexico DC-9 jetliner, bound for Los Angeles International Airport
from Mexico, collided with a single-engine Piper Archer 6,500 feet above
Cerritos, sending the DC-9 plunging to earth in a neighborhood just north of
183rd Street and Carmenita Road.
The disaster killed 15 people on the ground, all 64 in the DC-9 and the family
of three in the small plane, which crashed on an empty playground several
blocks away at Cerritos Elementary School.
Sixteen homes were destroyed or damaged. But time has a way of healing old
wounds.
Standing in her driveway, less than 50 feet from the crash site, Browning says
she no longer remembers the anguish of that day.
She knows she returned home shortly after the crash to find the last stretch of
her route blocked by fire. She knows she parked her car and raced home on
foot. She knows that her tranquil neighborhood looked like Vietnam or what she
imagined Vietnam looked like during the war.
But Browning can't describe the carnage or recall her emotions.
-- Memories Gone --
The crushing pain of a neighborhood's worst nightmare, she says, has found an
escape from her mind and body.
"I don't remember the ugliness about that plane," she says. "I come out here
and I look, and I really don't remember."
Some neighbors have moved away, of course including Theresa Estrada, who lost
her husband, daughter and one son when the plane flattened their rented home on
Ashworth Place.
But others rebuilt their homes and stayed. Dennis McIllwain, whose wife of 21
years perished while he and the rest of the family were away, gutted what
little remained of the family's home, so that the rebuilt house's floorplan
would be completely different.
It was, he said in a 1988 interview, a way of changing his life without
changing too much.
John Augustine, a retired veteran with a low, scratchy voice, remembers that
time with a single word. "Tears," he says.
In the months and years following the accident, there was talk of erecting a
memorial. But most residents rejected the idea, wanting instead a return to
normalcy.
They'd had enough of media trucks, looky-loos and tragic reminders.
-- No Memorials --
Nonetheless, visitors sometimes still expect to find something a plaque, a
park, anything to show where the planes went down.
"A guy came a week ago and wanted to see where his grandpa died," says Mena
Sedarous, a 14-year-old whose family moved to the neighborhood a few months
ago. "He thought there was a memorial."
Some residents still struggling to block out the ugliness of the tragic day see
little use in talking about the experience.
Asked to discuss it, one Reva Circle resident shakes his head solemnly. "We're
just trying to forget it," he says.
For Ralph Ostrander, one of the newer residents of Holmes Avenue, there's
nothing to block out.
When Ostrander moved here, the property sales information made mention of the
crash site. But the tragedy didn't affect home values much, he says, and
rarely do real-estate agents even mention it anymore.
"It might as well be a thousand years ago," he says of the event, which
destroyed part of what is now his home and engulfed the property in debris.
"There's no evidence whatsoever."
Taking an evening stroll on Holmes Avenue, Bob and Judy Didlock pause to gaze
briefly at the impact site, an area they remember as "a big crater."
The tragedy is a distant memory that rarely creeps into their conversations.
"I haven't thought about (the crash) in a long time," Bob Didlock says, adding
that he had no idea 15 years had passed.
"It seems longer," adds his wife.
Despite the passage of time, though, things about the Cerritos plane crash
will, undoubtedly, live on sad, frightening, poignant or life-affirming.
"To make sure every day counts with your family," Browning says thoughtfully.
"That's how it affects me."
Long Beach (Calif.) Press-Telegram
Friday, August 31, 2001
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