Terror and Death : Sledgehammer From the Sky Hits Cerritos

Barbara O’Neill shifted the family car into reverse and looked up to see a silver DC-9 slice through a tree 10 feet overhead and slam into a nearby house like a sledgehammer from the sky.

She said her son, Shane, 9, saved her life.

At the last minute, he had pleaded to go with her to the store to buy things for her daughter Dawn’s 17th birthday party--and she had been annoyed. “He was holding me up,” she said. Just long enough, it turned out, for the two of them to avoid by a few seconds the intersection where the plane hit.

Shuddered With Dread

People throughout Cerritos shuddered with dread as some recounted watching and others hearing the collision Sunday between the Aeromexico DC-9 and a single-engine plane that turned a quiet weekend morning in their middle- and upper-middle-class suburb into a day of death, destruction and terror.

The Mexican jetliner shed flakes of shattered metal as it fell. It exploded when it hit, hurling chunks of fiery debris into several homes. Nine houses were destroyed and seven others were heavily damaged, according to Red Cross officials. Firefighters said at least three people on the ground were killed.

All were members of the same family. Frank Estrada Sr. was in his house when a piece of burning airliner struck it and set it afire. Estrada died in the flames, as did his daughter, Angelica, 14, and son, Javier, 16. Angelica’s twin brother, Alejandro, was in the garage at the time. A wall collapsed on him, but he escaped.

The children’s mother was grocery shopping and was not harmed. Another son, Frank Estrada Jr., 18, was water-skiing in Arizona. He returned to his home to find it in ruins--and three members of his family dead.

Nine other people on the ground were injured, firefighter Richard Clayton said. They included three county firefighters and one deputy sheriff. Clayton said all of the injuries were minor.

Among the cut and burned was Wesley Neally, 39, of 17925 Holmes Ave., who was taken to Pioneer Hospital after portions of the jet fell onto his house. He was inside, along with his wife, Carmine; one daughter, Reanna, 8, and one of her girlfriends.

“I heard the jet coming down pretty low,” Neally said. “There was a boom, then two or three other booms.”

Then, he said, the house exploded.

“I ran out the back door, all this fire was falling on me--and jet fuel.”

He said he could not see his wife and daughter, so he ran back into the house and searched room by room. In despair, he returned to the backyard--and found both of them, as well as his daughter’s friend, safe but frightened.

‘Nothing But Fire’

Neally said he looked east, west and south. “Everywhere we looked,” he said, “there was nothing but fire.”

So he and his family ran north. They jumped over a concrete fence and into a neighbor’s yard, then pulled down a grape-stake fence so they could keep running. They encountered another neighbor fleeing his burning house. The neighbor held his baby in his arms. Together, they made their way into the street.

“There were just balls of fire everywhere,” Neally said.

A burly six-footer who works as a Los Angeles County weights and measures inspector, he sat in a wheelchair at the hospital as his parents comforted his wife. But he took little comfort himself when a nurse finally told him that he could go home. “I hear there’s nothing left of our house,” Neally muttered. “It’s all destroyed.”

Ignited Like Tinder

The intersection of Holmes and Ashworth Place, not far from the center of Cerritos--a community that prided itself in the 1970s on being the fastest-growing in the state--appeared to be a point of major impact. Parts of the jetliner hit half a dozen stucco homes in the area. Most residences in the city cost from $150,000 to $350,000.

The houses had shake and shingle roofs. They ignited like tinder.

Cerritos is home to about 50,000 people. Slightly more than half are white; the rest are a racial mix, including a highly educated and growing Asian population. The tragedy did not discriminate. Cars and vans were blackened, and windows were broken by explosions and intense heat.

Torn and broken bodies were scattered about. A concrete wall along Carmenita Road was smeared with blood. The single-engine plane fell into the playground at Cerritos Elementary School. The schoolyard was empty. It had been closed for the Labor Day weekend.

Triage Center Set Up

The Red Cross set up a triage center and shelter at a General Telephone office in the neighborhood. It became the first place to search for the missing.

In the parking garage, volunteers organized food service.

The atmosphere was tense in a coffee-room upstairs. A teen-age girl cried, waiting for word about her family.

Jan Perna, 25, of Garden Grove looked for her sister, Sue Nelson, and her family. Perna and her family had planned to visit them Sunday night. Instead, she said, she got a call from her sister just after noon.

“She said, ‘My house is burning! It’s going to be gone.’ ” Perna said her sister sounded hysterical, but insisted that she and the family were fine. “I don’t know,” Perna added, doubtfully. “I got to the corner of one street, and everything was leveled. There was so much smoke, I could hardly see. There were no houses left.

‘Heard an Explosion’

“I was about 400 yards from my sister’s house,” she said, but could not see for certain because of the smoke.

Sue and Wayne Nelson, it turned out, were safe. But their home at 13432 Ashworth was badly damaged. The Nelsons were in the kitchen eating lunch when the planes collided. “We heard an explosion,” Sue Nelson said. “We looked at each other, thinking: What is this? The noise got louder.

“Then I knew. There was a huge crash, and then beams and wood started falling in my living room. I had heard the impact of planes colliding. My little boy was in the garage. All I could think was, ‘My little boy is dead.’ ” She ran into the garage. Her son, who is 7, was safe. She pulled him out. The garage burned.

‘I Knew We Were Dead’

“I knew it was a jet coming down,” Wayne Nelson said, “and I knew we were dead. Then when we weren’t dead, I thought it was unbelievable.”

He added: “We polished the cars this weekend. Now we’re going to rebuild a house.”

One resident, Rosemary Bobber, was reading a newspaper in her kitchen. “I saw the shadow of a big plane coming right down,” she said. “And I didn’t know whether I should run or stay there.”

She stayed inside. “Then I heard the crash.

The jet fell 20 yards from her home.

Her husband, Jim, was in the garage. “You couldn’t believe how loud it was,” he said. “Everything in the house shook. We’re so lucky that nothing happened to us.”

‘It Was Pretty Bad’

Tim Kramer, 17, a senior at Cerritos High, had stopped to get a soft drink with a friend. “If we hadn’t stopped, we would have been turning in just where the plane hit,” he said. “We hopped a couple of fences. We got to my friend’s home. It was pretty bad. You could see guts and blood all over.”

Frank Culhno, 17, a senior at Gahr High, was dropping off his uncle’s truck. “Everything exploded. We jumped over the fences. . . . I saw the body of an elderly woman.”

“I was just wondering what these people thought when they were coming down.”

Not far from the two teen-agers, on the sidewalks and in yards, were pieces of fuselage and parts of jet engines--as well as a number of personal belongings: wallets, stationery from the Acapulco Hotel, hand luggage, tissues.

Lying on one lawn was a book, “El Viajero”--the traveler.

Peter Kang, 14, was brushing his teeth when the window shattered in his bathroom.

“I heard all this screaming everywhere,” he said. “The smoke seemed to cover up the sun. It was like a deep fog.”

After firefighters arrived, people seemed to calm down.

“Now people are just picking up the pieces,” Kang said.

‘I Started Screaming’

But Yvonne Hutzler said she would never forget what had happened. A secretary who lives at 18021 Holmes Ave., she said:

“I threw myself on the ground. I started screaming and dialed 911. The next thing I knew there were men in the backyard, telling me to get out of here. I broke down and said, ‘I can’t find any of my cats.’ I keep thinking it is just a nightmare, but it’s the real thing.”

Traffic piled up on the streets.

Tim D’Heilly, 28, was riding a motorcycle on Carmenita when he heard an explosion, looked up and saw the jetliner upside down and coming straight down.

He braked, and several cars on Carmenita rear-ended each other in the commotion.

The plane missed them.

Wreckage Rained Down

But pieces of wreckage and burning jet fuel rained down. “Carmenita Road was entirely aflame,” said Ron Whitlock, a City of Orange police detective who was on his way to a friend’s house in Los Angeles when the plane crashed before his eyes.

“I was first on the scene. When I saw the explosion, I knew they would need help.”

The sound of collision overhead made Mohammed Nikamal, 30, look up. “An airplane was coming at me. It was like in the movies--the whole thing coming. Then it hit the ground. The whole house moved like in an earthquake. . . . It was really scary, like the whole world exploding. People were screaming, crying.

“I saw pieces of airplane, bodies all over--scattered all over--bones all over.”

‘A Mass of Fire’

It reminded Eric Himes, 42, actor, television director and Vietnam veteran, of the war in Southeast Asia.

“There was a body here and a body there. . . . The entire street was a mass of fire.”

The fireball looked to Lesa Rusch like a huge mushroom.

It was followed by dense, billowing smoke. “You couldn’t see a thing,” she said.

A friend, Gil Hasegawa, shouted: “Run!”

Then he changed his mind. “Don’t run,” he said. “There’s nowhere to go.”

In a grassy area at Cerritos Elementary, the top part of the cockpit of the single-engine plane appeared to have been sheared off. A woman’s leg and foot, still wearing a shoe, protruded. Plastic covered other body parts.

“It’s a good thing,” said Inspector Rob Smith of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, “there weren’t any schoolchildren playing there at the time.”