Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (35 page)

When the engine exploded behind his head, Yisroel went into a state of paralytic terror. The crash of United Flight 232 left him permanently scarred, not only physically but also emotionally. When I met him, he was a thirty-two-year-old psychologist who smoked Newport cigarettes—not quite chain-smoking—and talked rapidly and urgently about his experience. Heavyset and baby-faced under a black yarmulke, he wore torn black jeans. “And no one in my community would ever wear jeans,” he said. He wore his black hair spiked and had a generally edgy look about him that he said did not go over well in his ultra-orthodox Jewish milieu. He said that he was a born rebel. The crash had made him more so. When he was eighteen, he enlisted in the Israeli Army to annoy his father. The Israelis took one look at his medical records and threw him out.

Shortly after the engine exploded, Donna McGrady came down the aisle with a worried look on her face. She leaned across Yisroel to Sudlow and asked if he would be her door helper. The last exit on the starboard side, 4-Right, was directly behind Sudlow’s seat. Yisroel stood and they switched seats so that Sudlow was on the aisle. Yisroel was quaking with fear, and the view out the window made it worse. The prayer was not working. As soon as McGrady left, Sudlow tried showing Yisroel how to brace, but Yisroel found it impossible to concentrate. He was rigid with fear. He later said that his mind kept screaming, “Please stop! Please stop! Please stop! I had this sensation of begging on a psychological level.”

Although Sudlow had shown him how to brace, Yisroel could not help himself. When the order came from the cockpit and McGrady began screaming from her jump seat right behind them, “Brace! Brace! Brace!” Yisroel was unable to move. Sudlow said, “You have to brace, you have to brace. Remember what I showed you?” Yisroel could only squeeze his eyes shut and wait for death to take him. At the last moment, Sudlow took hold of Yisroel and shoved his upper body down to the floor, “and he put his body on top of mine,” Yisroel recalled. Sudlow lay on top of the child, crushing him, forcing him out of harm’s way. Then the crash began, and to Yisroel it seemed to go on forever. “It was probably a matter of seconds, but in my brain it was like an hour. I saw a lot of flame throughout.” The smell of burning foam rubber was forever imprinted in his emotional system. He said, “It’s the smell of like destroyed foam or something like maybe if somebody took it and scratched it for a long time and then you smelled it.”

During the crash, he remembered, “The first five seconds were insanely loud. The second five seconds, also. The last five seconds, I still remember hating the fact that we were rolling.” And then Yisroel leaned in toward me and whispered, “But it was silent. Almost like a comfort. But, oh, my God, we were still flying. We were still rolling.”

The quiet was replaced by a ripping sound, “almost like if you took, let’s say, like a snow plowing truck and take it onto this lawn and dig it into the grass and drive forward.” As he told me his story, we sat in my backyard in the month of May, surrounded by lush greenery, a profusion of red roses. “You know that like ripping sound of weeds. I’ll hear it, and I start shaking.”

Then everything stopped.

As Yisroel looked out from his position trapped beneath debris with Sudlow on top of him, he could see flames burning on the runway where fuel had been spilled. But the fire soon died down and flickered out.

Three seats away, Martha Conant unlatched her seat belt, dropped, and stepped out onto the moist earth. Susan and Dave Randa also rapidly freed themselves and emerged. Susan White was shouting, “Wiggle! Wiggle! Wiggle!” and dropping to the ground. The Air National Guard arrived and entered the tail to look for survivors.

Yisroel’s hearing began to return. A man was trying to save Sudlow, but the kind businessman’s back was broken, his internal organs crushed, his lungs filled with fluid. He had acted as a shock absorber for the boy. Yisroel was hollering his address and phone number over and over again. Soon he was lying in an ambulance alongside a woman who was dying.

“I was torn to pieces,” Yisroel said. “My right arm wasn’t connected besides one of the bones. My whole arm was off.” His skull was fractured in three places. His brain was hemorrhaging. On my patio, he took off his yarmulke and leaned over the wrought-iron table, “I still have a huge dent,” he said. He showed me a white gouge in his skull where hair no longer grew. In the hospital, the doctors were reluctant to put him under anesthesia for fear that he might lapse into a coma and never wake. But he survived, and two weeks later he and another boy were doing wheelies with their wheelchairs in the halls of the hospital.

“I do a lot of MMA,” he said, smoking his Newports as we sat drinking coffee. He meant mixed martial arts, the most violent and unrestrained form of boxing. Anything goes. “So I’m always, like, bruised and bleeding.” When I met him, his right cheekbone was scratched and bruised from taking a blow to the face. It was as if Yisroel had managed to find a pursuit that would re-create, in a small way, one of his most formative childhood experiences, from which he could eternally rise like a phoenix. He was mastering pain, agony, blood, injury. “Anytime I get clocked,” he said, “anytime I get hit in the face, I know exactly what it feels like. That’s probably similar to what I felt [in the crash].” His response reminded me of Tony Feeney jumping from a moving train.

Jason Henry, a lifeguard
at a municipal swimming pool in Sioux City, spent the morning of July 20, 1989, lifting the dead off of Air National Guard trucks and carrying them into the refrigerated semitrailers. He had turned twenty in June. His boss had asked for volunteers to help with the crash. Henry had no idea what he was volunteering for, but he and his friend Brian Massey raised their hands. More than two decades after his experience, when Henry tried to describe the process, he choked up and could not speak for a time.

At one point, a pickup truck arrived and he and Massey lifted the body bag out of the bed. The driver told Henry, “Make sure those bags don’t get separated.” Henry looked down and saw a foot in a ziplock bag on top of the body bag.

While Henry, Massey, and other volunteers moved bodies throughout the morning, Brad Randall, Marliss DeJong, Lawrence Harrington, Gary Brown, and others were setting up the temporary morgue in the hangar. By noon the portable X-ray unit had arrived from Offutt Air Force Base, and soon the morgue was ready to begin operating. Out on the field by that time, most of the bodies had been removed, except those inside the fuselage, so Henry and Massey were recruited as “trackers.”

Herbek said, “Once the body entered our identification area,” meaning Hangar 252, “they were given a person, a volunteer with a file that was not to leave that body as it traveled through this whole process. We wanted to make sure we did not lose the file or get bodies mixed up in the process. . . . We called them trackers.”

Henry was given a yellow apron to identify him as a tracker and was ushered into the morgue. “That was a tough one,” he told me. Once again, he could not continue to talk for a time. He remembered finding himself standing at the head of a body bag, facing a maze of blue moveable dividers about six feet high. All morning he had been grateful that he had not seen what was inside those bags he’d been carrying. Now an investigator from the DCI, wearing a pale blue plastic Sanapron disposable apron, unzipped the body bag on the gurney before him to reveal a beautiful young woman with long straight blonde hair wearing jeans and a blouse. Thomas Randolph, seated on a four-step wooden ladder to one side, flashed a strobe to take a photograph of her, while the investigator, with rapid snips of surgical scissors, quickly cut off her clothes and tossed them aside. Stunned and shaken, Henry watched as a DCI agent took notes on a clipboard. Now before him Henry saw a beautiful figure, as in Botticelli’s
The Birth of Venus
, who appeared for all the world as if she might stand up and walk away, her perfect breasts gleaming in the harsh light, the concavity of her pelvis, the rounded slope of her shoulder suggesting incipient movement. The DCI investigators turned her over, looking for scars, tattoos, any identifiable feature, but she was perfect in every way. He saw not a scratch on her.

Some people later criticized the operators of the morgue for allowing someone as young and sensitive as Jason Henry to do that job. But people younger than that go to war. And Thomas Randolph, the photographer, was a DCI special agent who worked both in the crime lab and in homicide investigations as a member of the Crime Scene Investigation team. Yet a year and a half after the crash, he was suffering so severely from post-traumatic stress so severely that he had to retire. His colleague, Robert Monserrate, told of Randolph having to help extract a mother and child from the burned fuselage. “
We found them together
still strapped to their seats hanging upside down,” said Monserrate. It was most likely Claudia Ellis, thirty-eight, and her eleven-year-old daughter Jaime Brines. After finishing with the recovery of bodies, Randolph worked as a photographer in the morgue, and when that job was done, he became a tracker. He followed the mother and daughter through the process of identification. “The death of that girl really upset Tom greatly,” said Monserrate, “as it did me. The difference was he never recovered after seeing her. Tom was on many psychological drugs delivered by several different psychiatrists. He tried working for Best Buy and Wal-Mart in their photo sections. I would see him sometimes when I would visit the stores but eventually stopped going to see him, because my presence would cause him great distress, since I would remind him of the crash.” Randolph continued to deteriorate and died in a nursing home at the age of sixty-four on October 21, 2005. “Sixteen years of torment came to an end,” said Monserrate.

As Henry tried to tell me about his own experience in the morgue that day, he broke down and wept and said, “I didn’t know it was still in there,” meaning the power of his memory of the youthful woman lying nude before him. Again, Randolph photographed the woman from his perch on the top step of the ladder, red trash cans with plastic liners on either side of him. Meanwhile, a DCI agent documented the dead woman’s clothing and personal effects, and then women in civilian clothes, wearing white aprons, put the property into a paper grocery sack, stapled it shut, and laid it on her gurney.

Henry remembered her body number as being 8 or else “in the single digits,” but the memory is probably wrong. Among the first ten body numbers, only two women were similar in age to the woman Henry saw: Priscilla Theroux, twenty-seven (who gave Tony Feeney her religious medal), and Connie Marie Kingsbury, thirty, bodies numbered 7 and 8.
Kingsbury died of
“severe skull and facial bone fractures,” according to the autopsy report. Other injuries included “multiple abrasions and contusions of body surfaces.” She also had a broken right arm and two broken hips. Her injuries would have been obvious. Theroux, too, died of so many injuries that Henry could not possibly have missed them. The next-nearest possible candidate, Elaine J. Asay, twenty-two, was body number 11, and she too had “severe abrasions over face and extremities,” as well as other injuries that Henry would have seen. Herbek and Randall said that the woman lying before Henry most likely suffered a broken neck or a wound to the head that was not visible beneath her hair. Heather Rose O’Mara, twenty-four, was a captain in the U.S. Army, a lawyer working as a prosecutor at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. She had dark wavy hair and thick dark eyebrows, so she was not the blonde Henry saw. In fact, no woman of the right age who died on that plane seems to fit Henry’s description. In the end, we can’t know who Henry accompanied through that mortuary maze. Call her Jane Doe then.

Technicians wheeled Jane deeper into the labyrinth of royal-blue partitions under the eerie high-intensity lights of Hangar 252. Surgical lights had been set up on tripods. Folding tables were scattered with papers, Diet Coke cans, fly swatters, coffee cups, and Apple computers and printers. Where folding tables could not be found, sheets of plywood had been laid across sawhorses to make more work space. Tall oscillating fans were blowing the air around, which had begun to smell strange, like a combination of fire and alcohol and something dark and forbidding, the bad breath of catastrophe. At the second station in the process of identification, Jane was subjected to a full-body X-ray. The films were whisked away to be processed. The machine would transform her beauty into ghostly skeletal images, which might reveal a broken bone that had healed years before, an implant, or some other identifiable feature of the anatomical figure that lay before the mystified boy. Henry was already confused by the process. Jane Doe was perfect, unscathed, so far as he could tell. Why not have her family identify her? But Henry was a volunteer. He was doing what he was told.

From the X-ray table, Jane was wheeled across the hangar to the enclosure where FBI technicians were taking fingerprints. They laid out small white paper plates such as might be used to serve cake at a birthday party. The plates were ranked in pairs, five sets on a table made of bare sheets of plywood on sawhorses flanked by buckets of cleanser, bottles of alcohol, and surgical scissors and tools, a puzzling array of devices, as Henry saw it, for what would seem a simple procedure.

As he watched, one of the agents wielded a pair of shears. They appeared to be for trimming trees but were in reality orthopedic clippers. The FBI technician lifted Jane’s delicate hand and proceeded to cut off the first joint of each finger. He placed each severed fingertip on a paper plate, ten fingertips on ten plates. Henry was speechless, quaking, his mind a blank as he watched. “You had a body that was recognizable and you’re making it less recognizable,” he said. “They cut all the fingertips off and then fingerprinted them and then put them into a ziplock bag, which goes back into the body bag.”

Randall later told me, “I know there was one of the guys in the fingerprint area that kind of developed a carpal-tunnel syndrome from snipping the fingers off all day long.”