‘I Was a Knucklehead,’ Woman Says of Role in Hijack

A Sacramento mother of five arrested last week for the 1972 hijacking of a PSA airliner said Wednesday that she helped Allen Gordon Sims commandeer the plane because he was “very tall, very handsome, very charming,” and she was two months pregnant.

“I was a knucklehead to get involved with him,” said Ida McCray, who is scheduled to be arraigned Monday on federal air piracy charges after 15 years as a fugitive. “But I was in love with him. I had broken up with my boyfriend, and he (Sims) was there to heal the wounds.”

In a dramatic account of Los Angeles’ first successful hijacking, McCray said she knew that Sims had smuggled guns onto the plane bound from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but did not know that he planned to hijack the aircraft.

“I knew he was up to something, but I didn’t know what until, boom, he pulled out the gun,” said McCray, who witnesses said trained a handgun on passengers while Sims ordered the pilot and co-pilot to fly to Havana. “He didn’t tell me anything, and I was too stupid to ask questions.”

In a tearful interview at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles, McCray, 36, said her subsequent years in hiding--first at a group home for international hijackers in Cuba, then moving from job to job, house to house in the United States--have cost her dearly.

“It’s ruined my life. It’s ruined my family. It’s ruined all five of my children. My son’s turned out to be everything I hate,” she said of 15-year-old Atiba Kimbrell, whose call to police last week led authorities to McCray’s suburban home in Sacramento.

The teen-ager told police that his mother and father had tied him up in the living room of their home and threatened to kill him, prompting him to call for help when he escaped. The San Francisco district attorney’s office has filed felony child abuse charges against both McCray and her boyfriend, Nevil Kimbrell, but McCray said she was simply trying to control her son.

Atiba, she said, had begun using drugs and stealing money from her and his grandmother to pay for them.

“The last week of December, he decided to check himself out of school, steal all the money I’d made all week and run back to Grandma (in San Francisco),” she said. “He was tied up . . . but he was there so he would listen to me. I was trying to tell him, ‘I’m your mom, I’m here risking my life trying to help you.’ ”

In fact, McCray said, she was powerless to help her children because contacting them at her mother’s meant risking detection.

“This is a hard price to pay. . . . I’m my mom’s only child, and you always want to come home and see the family,” she said, admitting that she thought “frequently” about turning herself in, but was always stopped by the thought of Sims’ 50-year prison sentence.

McCray said she spent two years and 10 months in Cuba after the Jan. 7, 1972, hijacking, most of it at a group home with about 50 other hijackers from around the world.

“We all lived in this one big house,” she said. “It was a little scary. You had people of all different types, of course. It was a thing where people would walk by and you’d grab your baby and say, ‘Come here.’ ”

All the time, she said, she was longing to go home. “They just wouldn’t let us leave. Then finally, when they started having relations with the U.S., they just started letting us slowly trickle out.”

McCray said she spent a few months in Jamaica, then flew to New York. “I didn’t have a passport, I just had a piece of paper with my name on it,” she recalled. Walking through Customs, “I was scared to death . . . but then one kid ran this way, and the other kid ran the other way, and they said, ‘Just let that lady through.’ ”

Many Different Jobs

McCray said she spent her first several days in New York living on subway trains, then finally found a job as a nurse’s aide, the first of many different jobs she had over the next 15 years.

Three months ago, she said, she moved to California “because of the wild teen-agers I have” and attempted to take Atiba off her mother’s hands.

One recent afternoon, McCray said, she was at her mother’s house when Sims telephoned from prison. Within moments after she left, FBI agents were at the house. It was her closest brush with discovery--until Atiba’s call to police last week.

“I love all my children. I love him, too,” she said. “Now, I don’t worry so much about myself. I worry about them. I’m very close to my children. . . . My mother brought them over to the jail to see me, and the little one, she picked up the phone and she just kept crying, and she said, ‘Mommy, you get out of here.’ ”