Promoter Says $3,600 for Cerritos Victims Raised

The promoter of a weekend rock ‘n’ roll fund-raiser to aid victims of the Aug. 31 midair collision over Cerritos said Monday that he plans to turn over as much as $3,600 to city officials to aid in underwriting the cost of reconstructing damaged and destroyed homes.

Richard Santana, the event’s promoter, said the event drew sparse attendance because “too many people would rather visit the crash site than come to something positive like a benefit.”

Nevertheless, Santana said he would promote another rock and disco band concert in a local shopping mall in an effort to raise funds for the Cerritos Air Disaster Fund. The fund was designed by Cerritos officials to help residents rebuild.

The collision between an Aeromexico DC-9 and a small private plane killed 82 people, including 15 on the ground.

The weekend fund-raiser, which drew no more than a few hundred people, was held at the county-operated Los Cerritos Regional Park. It was sponsored by Santana’s “Neighboraid,” which he says was designed to help raise cash for disaster victims.

Santana, 25, a caterer, said in a telephone interview from his Cerritos home that, minus his expenses, which he estimated were about $5,000, he would give the city’s relief fund about $1,800 from ticket sales and about the same amount from the sale of T-shirts sold at $10 apiece at the weekend concert.

Additionally, he said, people handed him checks at the event, which charged $7.50 admission, but he doesn’t know how much more assistance money the checks will generate.

Santana, who lives about a block and a half from the crash site, said he had become the manager for one of the rock groups that performed at the fund raising-event, Klockwerk Orange. But, he said, there wasn’t any conflict of interest because he hadn’t started to officially represent the group until Monday, the day after the weekend event.

Santana said he developed Neighboraid to help crash victims whose home insurance policies, he claimed, didn’t cover the type of disaster that occurred last August.

But an insurance industry representative said on Monday that Santana was misinformed and that virtually all home insurance policies had “insured perils” clauses that would reimburse the victims either wholly or in part.

“Aircraft or falling objects are specifically named in policies as insured perils,” said Jim Snyder of the Santa Ana-based Western Insurance Information Service, a nonprofit organization made up of 40 property casualty insurers in the Western states. “It’s virtually universal.”

The question, Snyder said, is whether homeowners had enough insurance to cover all or only a portion of their losses.

Tenants, he said, would have to have a renter’s policy to make a claim for any damage.

The Insurance Information Service plans to hold a meeting to bring together victims and officials from the state Department of Insurance and from the City of Cerritos to work out any insurance problems.

Asked where he got the idea that homeowners weren’t covered for an air disaster, Santana said: “That’s what I was told. . . . That’s what one of the families said. I don’t know. I’m not an insurance man.”

Michele Ogle, a spokeswoman for the City of Cerritos, said the city has not sponsored any of the half a dozen or so benefits held for victims of the air disaster because “it would take too much staff time.” Instead, she said, the city has offered its facilities for fund-raisers.

She said that Santana proposed the fund-raiser a few weeks ago to city officials and that he said he could get some “big-name entertainers” such as pop/rock stars Tina Turner and Huey Lewis.

“Our staff called the agents of those entertainers and they said they had never spoken to him,” she said. “So we had reason to believe he wouldn’t be able to deliver on some of the promises he made for the event.”

About $164,000 has been raised by local organizations, such as the Optimists and Lions, she said, and about $112,000 of that money has been distributed to victims. She said that when Santana delivers the proceeds from the weekend rock event, those funds would be added to the funds for victims.

Times staff writer Steve Churm contributed to this story.