Families Have Unhappy Job of Helping Identify Victims

Donnie and Mary Ann Ratliff had the gruesome task this week of going to the temporary morgue at Detroit Metropolitan Airport to identify the personal belongings of their 16-year-old daughter, Hidi.

Hidi was among at least 154 passengers killed Sunday night when Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashed on takeoff from Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport. She had just spent two weeks at her father’s home in Toledo, Ohio, and was en route to her home in Santa Ana, Calif.

“All they found was her wallet--badly burnt--with her school ID and Social Security card,” said Donnie Ratliff.

All week, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department has been shuttling members of crash victims’ families between an airport motel and the temporary morgue, set up in an airplane hangar near the crash site.

Remains Studied

In one part of the hangar, working at a task that a medical examiner’s staff member said has devastated even veteran accident investigators, forensic pathologists and dentists studied remains of the victims, looking for clues that would lead to their identification.

In another part, family members examined personal belongings recovered from the crash site, looking for jewelry or some other item that would help to identify the body found wearing it or near it amid the wreckage.

“Everybody was milling around the table trying to see something,” Donnie Ratliff said about the scene inside the morgue.

Wayne County Medical Examiner Dr. Werner U. Spitz, who is supervising the identification of the bodies, has said he hopes to be able to release a complete list of the crash victims by the end of the week.

The identification process has been slow, Spitz told reporters outside the morgue Tuesday. “I have never seen such complete destruction,” he said.

Personal Counselor

The families of dozens of victims have been flown into Detroit, booked into hotels near the airport and assigned a personal counselor by Northwest Airlines.

The airline has been extremely protective of the families’ privacy, even taking the highly unusual step of withholding the list of those who were on the flight.

“Northwest is being as good as they can,” said Donnie Ratliff. “We just wish we could get Hidi back.”

He said he was “thankful” for the two weeks he had with his daughter just before she died.

“We’ve stayed very close,” said Ratliff, whose daughter and ex-wife moved to California 14 years ago.

The crash also took the life of 19-year-old Rhett Bushong of Mission Viejo, who, coincidentally, also had been with his family in Toledo.

The family--parents Reid and Jean Bushong and three sons--had been in Ohio for a big family reunion. There was lots to celebrate: Reid Bushong’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, the wedding of one of his nieces and the 30th reunion of his 1957 DeVilbiss High School class.

The high school reunion was Saturday. On Sunday, Rhett Bushong’s grandmother drove him to the airport here, where he checked in for his flight to Orange County on Continental Airlines.

That flight was delayed, so Rhett switched to Northwest Flight 255. He called his grandmother in Mission Viejo to notify her of the change.

“We didn’t even know he was on that flight until his grandmother called,” Reid Bushong said. “She heard on the news the plane had crashed.”

Rhett Bushong was flying home ahead of his family so he would not miss the first day of football practice at Saddleback College, his father said.

The Bushongs have mostly stayed in Toledo since the crash. A Northwest representative calls a few times each day “just to keep in contact with us” and to work out the details of returning Rhett’s body to them, Reid Bushong said Wednesday, speaking from Ohio.

Family members have yet to make the trip to the morgue to sift through belongings. Rhett Bushong’s suitcase arrived in Orange County unscathed late Sunday night--presumably aboard the Continental flight he was originally booked on.

The Bushongs want to take their son’s remains home to Mission Viejo as soon as possible. Northwest will pay for the funeral and will fly the family back home, as it is doing for other victims’ families.

In addition to Rhett Bushong, two women originally had been scheduled to fly to Orange County on Sunday aboard Continental Airlines Flight 657.

But after a “mechanical problem” was detected, the Continental flight was delayed and its passengers were offered seats on the Northwest flight, Continental spokesman Rick Scott said.

Orange County-bound Virginia Robinson, 45, of Fountain Valley, and Joanne Surowitz, 18, of West Bloomfield, Mich., were the others who accepted the change in flight plans and boarded the ill-fated Northwest plane.

Surowitz, a recent high school graduate, was traveling to join her parents at their new home in Tustin. Robinson, known to her friends as “Ginger,” and her family had been visiting relatives in Pontiac, Mich.

Family friends said Robinson was returning early to get to her job Monday as a receptionist in a Garden Grove doctor’s office. She is survived by her husband, Bill, 46, son, Scott, 16, and daughter, Theresa, 11, who remained in Michigan.

Word of Robinson’s death pained neighbors and friends at the Faith Lutheran Church in Huntington Beach, where she was superintendent of Sunday school and her husband is chairman of the church board of directors.

“I know it’s a cliche, but what else can you say?” said Bonnie Monary, a family friend, describing the Robinson family as “in a state of shock. They’re not willing to accept it . . . . My husband is just devastated by it. We were all very close.”

For the families who have come to Detroit, there is little to do besides identifying belongings and handing over dental and medical records. But many remain, clustered in their hotels or at the airport lounge, exchanging stories and compassion with strangers who share their tragedy.

“Most of them want to be here, to be where it happened,” said a Northwest official who requested anonymity. “It helps them to be in the presence of so many others who suffered the same thing. They don’t feel so alone.”

Staff writer Mark Landsbaum, in Orange County, contributed to this story.