Trip to Market Spared Lives of 3 in Apartment Hit by Plane

Elizabeth Cheguen said it was her quick trip to the market with her daughter and niece that spared them from injury or death when a small airplane cartwheeled off a palm tree and crashed into her bedroom.

A still-shaken Cheguen returned with her family Sunday to gather their few remaining possessions from the charred rubble that remained of their Buena Park apartment, which was engulfed in flames after the crash at 12:12 p.m. Saturday.

Elizabeth Cheguen recalled Sunday that she had been tending to her 4-year-old daughter, Michele, and 9-year-old niece, Nicole Valadez, shortly before noon Saturday. Had she not made the hasty decision to go to grocery store, Cheguen speculated that all three probably would have injured or killed when the plane crashed and exploded.

One of six families displaced by Saturday’s crash, the Cheguens were able to retrieve only a stereo, a rocking chair, a photo album, some clothing and Elizabeth Cheguen’s sewing kit among the charred debris.

Minor Injury to Firefighter

As they and other displaced families tried to pull together the pieces of their lives Sunday, authorities began the laborious task of determining what caused the single-engine Piper Cherokee Arrow to apparently lose power shortly after takeoff and plunge its 64-year-old pilot to his death. No one on the ground was hurt in the crash, but one firefighter suffered a minor injury while battling the blaze.

A preliminary autopsy Sunday failed to determine what caused the death of pilot Lewis Hassman of Westminster, who had taken off from Fullerton Municipal Airport in his private plane, on his regular twice-monthly visit to see his wife in an Oregon nursing home, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner said.

Further tests will be required to determine the exact cause of Hassman’s death, but the pilot was believed to have been alive at the time of the impact, an Orange County deputy coroner said.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration finished removing the plane wreckage from the crash site late Saturday night. Investigators must now begin the job of reconstructing the events that led to the crash.

Aviation officials cannot yet say when they will know what caused Hassman’s aircraft to lose power shortly after takeoff and cartwheel 100 feet into the buildings below.

“For the Cerritos crash it took almost 11 months to determine the cause,” said Alan Pollack, a spokesman for the NTSB in Washington, D.C., referring to the mid-air crash of a small plane and an Aeromexico jetliner that killed 82 people in August, 1986. “As far as time frame on this crash, it’s hard to tell. It’s a jigsaw puzzle. We’re basically detectives. We look at all aspects of the accident.”

The NTSB investigator in Los Angeles, Don Lorrente, will head the agency’s examination of the crash, Pollack said. Lorrente will investigate the crash site, determine whether the pilot was in contact with air controllers before the crash, check Hassman’s background and the aircraft’s maintenance history. Wreckage parts will be sent for laboratory tests to determine how the aircraft broke up and burned, Pollack said.

FAA Assisting

Federal Aviation Administration officials in Los Angeles said they are assisting in the crash investigation.

Gary Mucho, Lorrente’s supervisor with the NTSB office in Los Angeles, said the fact-finding into the crash should be completed within the next two days, but that a final determination of cause could take “a couple of months.”.

Witnesses to the crash said Hassman’s blue-and-white Cherokee appeared to have lost power just after taking off from Fullerton Municipal Airport at 12:09 p.m. Minutes later, its left wing clipped a tall palm tree, sending it tumbling into a cluster of three-unit apartment buildings. The plane exploded into flames on contact.

Hassman was en route to Pendleton, Ore., flying to visit his wife, who suffered a stroke two years ago and is in an Oregon convalescent home, a neighbor said.

The crash and the blaze that followed destroyed or damaged six apartments, suddenly making the Cheguens and 10 other renters homeless. The Cheguens, along with four other people, moved into motel rooms provided by the Red Cross on Saturday and Sunday nights.

“I don’t know where we’d be without the Red Cross,” said Juan Cheguen, standing over the family’s few possessions on a sidewalk outside the empty apartment. The management of the Village Garden Apartments found open apartments in the same complex for the other tenants who were evacuated.

At least one and possibly two of the buildings where the Cheguens lived will have to be leveled and rebuilt, apartment manager Robert Hasty said.

Elizabeth Cheguen said she wasn’t able to sleep Saturday night at the motel. And on Sunday morning, she awoke early, still thinking about how close she had come to death or injury.

She was shaking her head as she viewed the apartment for the first time Sunday morning, staring into the blackened, 10-foot hole where her bedroom window used to be.

“I could still see the flames,” she said.