Kin of Missing in Cerritos Feel ‘Wrenching Grief’

For some residents of the Cerritos neighborhood devastated by the wreckage of the Aeromexico DC-9, shock gave way Monday to an intense need for something to show whether missing loved ones were alive or dead.

With an uncertain number of residents unaccounted for, only fragments of some bodies had been found, making immediate identification difficult--or impossible.

Los Angeles County Mental Health Department counselor David Leslie spent much of Monday morning talking to Dennis McIllwain, son Jeff and daughter Deborah, who were awaiting word on the fate of McIllwain’s wife, Linda, 40. McIllwain had gone on a brief errand Sunday, returning home to find his home destroyed and his wife missing.

“They can’t find the remains,” Leslie said. “You know part of the grieving process is seeing a body. And having a funeral.”

Leslie was one of three Los Angeles County Health Department counselors who were joined by clergymen and other volunteers trying to ease the grief for kin of the missing.

What those families were experiencing Monday, Leslie said, was “an almost convulsive, wrenching kind of grief. The only thing we can do is establish rapport; let them talk . . . about their feelings, their frustrations, their anger and their sense of loss.”

Some, Leslie said, initially tried to deny to themselves and to counselors that members of their families had died because they had nothing to prove it. Then would come the breakdown as realization set in.

Most of the 30 people who spent the night in the shelter set up by the American Red Cross in the gymnasium of Cerritos High School, however, were simply what Red Cross spokesman John Hall called “victims of yellow tape,” the ribbon strung by authorities to bar entry--even by residents--to the 6-by-8-block crash area.

Some people clung to their homes, not daring to leave for fear of looters and of being refused permission to return. Don Rhodes of the Red Cross told a fellow worker that some of the residents who had refused to leave the area were growing more and more distressed because bodies were in their yards and “it’s affecting them emotionally.”

There were those at the shelter who were angry because they were not being allowed to go home. Men, women and children sat staring; trying to grasp reality from the nightmare. Some stood talking quietly with friends and relatives. Blankets lay in haphazard piles on the cots where the displaced residents had spent the long night.

Food, Information Available

There were donated hamburgers and doughnuts on a long table. Red Cross workers walked quickly here and there, trying to organize food, clothing, message-board information and telephones.

On a stack of folded bleacher seats had been taped two sheets of paper. Under “Inquiries for Missing Persons” were the names of people looking for relatives. And answers. John Taylor, for instance, had been looking for his brother. Someone had printed alongside that inquiry: “In Cypress with aunt.”

More than a dozen people, those with family members unaccounted for, were grieving in temporary classrooms, away from the others and from the swarm of reporters. Red Cross volunteers tied large blue-plastic tarpaulins to a chain link fence to give the families some privacy.

The mental health counselors and volunteer clergymen were with the families, urging them to talk out their emotions.

Asked if relatives of the missing were upset and angry because they could not learn anything definite, mental health counselor Leslie said: “That’s the general tenor of things. They’re in a special kind of hell. They’re in limbo.”

He said inquiries by the families to the coroner’s office, to the Sheriff’s Department and to hospitals had been fruitless. “They feel as though there is a conspiracy of silence.”

L. G. Chaddick, Baptist minister and a family counselor with the Southern Baptist Convention, said: “Every time a new family member comes in, they relive the whole thing. I believe part of the therapy is retelling the story.”

He told of counseling a 25-year-old man whose brother had been a passenger on the Aeromexico plane. The family lived only about 15 miles from the crash site and had rushed to Cerritos the moment they had heard the news. During the counseling session Sunday night, Chaddick said, the young man began to hyperventilate and then became catatonic. . . . “Every muscle in his body looked like it was turning to iron.”

The man and other surviving brothers had had a premonition before the crash, Chaddick said. One of them had picked a bouquet of flowers for no apparent reason.

Without a body to view, Chaddick said, “you have nothing. How can you come to grips with the fact that this person is gone? Something doesn’t just vanish out of your mind all of a sudden. But there is nothing tangible. . . .”

Can’t Make Funeral Plans

He said he spent most of Monday morning talking to one family who wanted to make funeral plans but did not yet have a body. “How can they make funeral arrangements if there is still something missing?” Chaddick wanted to know.

He said he was counseling the stricken family to wait; to have a memorial service as soon as they wished, then to hold a graveside service when the body was found and identified.

Late Monday morning, Leslie and Herlinda Jackson, clinical program directors of the County Mental Health Department, were summoned to a nearby building to begin counseling paramedics, law enforcement officers and others affected by being first on the disaster scene.

Although paramedics and law enforcement officers are often exposed to death and injury, Leslie said: “I don’t think they’ve seen as complete devastation as this. . . . It’s a very pervasive situation. None of us were prepared for this.”

Similar counseling was provided emergency personnel after the September, 1978, PSA air crash in San Diego, although it came much later. One result of the San Diego experience was the realization that psychological counseling should begin much earlier, officials said.

As for the future effects on the entire neighborhood, Leslie said it has been a close-knit community. “They may discuss it,” he said. “They may be debriefing with their friends and seem to be OK. Suddenly, they may have sleep disruption. Insomnia. Anorexia. Loss of appetite. These are the kind of symptoms that will show up in a week or two in people not directly impacted by the crash.”

Keith Higgenbotham, 19, said he and his sister, Kari, 16, went out of their house at 13348 Durango Place on Sunday night, several hours after the crash, only to be barred by sheriff’s deputies from returning a short time later.

That, Higgenbotham said, was despite the fact the home was a mere 30 feet inside the yellow tape and the pleas of their parents who came outside. Kari, said Higgenbotham, even hugged her parents across the tape. “It wasn’t like they were standing far away.”

Brother and sister spent the night in the high school gymnasium, then returned to the perimeter at 7 a.m., when they still were not allowed to cross.

Tony Asa, 22, of 13507 Felson St., had helped hose down houses until 3 a.m. Monday, then went to the Red Cross shelter at the high school. He was upset that officials would not let him return home.

Asked how he was dealing with the tragedy, Asa said “You’re just too stunned to really believe that it would happen here. It’s a scene that you’d see on TV. It’s too unreal. The place smelled like burnt flesh. Death was all over the place.”

By Monday afternoon, authorities had reopened 75% of the restricted area to residents only. And by mid-evening, after county coroner’s officials concluded they had gathered the remains of all victims, most emergency crews withdrew. The yellow tape came down.