They Survived : Air Crash Verdict Provides a Sense of Relief for Scarred Neighborhood

Relief washed across Maggie Prendiz’s face like an incoming tide.

“Thank goodness!” she exclaimed on hearing news of the verdict in a federal trial to place blame in the 1986 midair collision between a single-engine plane and an Aeromexico jetliner in the skies above Cerritos. The crippled DC-9 fell like a rock into the quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood where Prendiz lived, destroying her family’s home of 16 years in a flash of flame.

For Prendiz, the daily news accounts of the trial in a Los Angeles courtroom had kept alive the unsettling memory of that Labor Day weekend disaster. The jury’s verdict, she said, finally ends a difficult chapter in her family’s life.

“It has been such a long, emotional trial for some of us,” Prendiz said Friday as she stood in the driveway of her rebuilt home in the 17900 block of Holmes Avenue. “I’m just glad it’s over. Maybe now we can stop watching this thing on TV. I know I’ll rest easier tonight.”

Overcoming sleepless nights, frayed nerves and the loss of loved ones in the wake of the Aeromexico air disaster has been slow but steady for Prendiz and her neighbors.

Some say the physical restoration of the neighborhood of stucco homes and neatly clipped lawns on the east side of Cerritos has gone better than the psychological recovery of residents.

All but of one of the 17 homes badly damaged or destroyed in the fiery crash of Aeromexico Flight 498 have been rebuilt or repaired. Fresh asphalt covers the scars left by the plane’s fuselage as it showered down on Holmes Avenue, Ashworth Place and Reva Circle. New trees planted along the area’s sidewalks are sprouting spring growth.

$4 Million Damage

To outsiders, the neighborhood hardly resembles the chaotic scene of Aug. 31, 1986, when 82 people, 15 of them on the ground, were killed here in the worst air disaster in Los Angeles County history. Damage to the neighborhood alone was nearly $4 million.

“If you didn’t know it happened here, you’d never know,” said John Augustine, whose home on Reva Circle sustained only minor damage. “Yet, nearly three years later, we still get people driving around, pointing at the sky, their mouths wide open. I guess we’ll always be an attraction.”

Rebuilding has engendered a closeness among many residents in the ethnically mixed neighborhood.

“Among those who have stayed, there is a feeling we survived something together,” said John O’Neill, a college student who was out buying ice for his sister’s birthday party when the jetliner crashed down two homes away from his parent’s house. “It was an incredible few days, and you got know your neighbors real well. . . . The new people who have moved here just don’t understand.”

Decision Welcomed

O’Neill, like others in the neighborhood, applauded the jury’s decision to blame the calamity equally on the Federal Aviation Administration and the pilot of the private plane that hit the DC-9. He said the small plane had clearly drifted into air space restricted for commercial airline traffic and federal officials failed to spot the intrusion and warn the Aeromexico flight crew.

“It seems like a just verdict,” O’Neill said. “But in the end, what does it really prove? It can’t turn back the clock.”

And try as some might, it is difficult to escape reminders of the tragedy. Like the bouquets of flowers that mysteriously appear in the night in front of some homes. Or the basket of fruit and coins, an American Indian tradition, that is placed in front of the home where the Yackytooahnipahs lived on Holmes Avenue. Six family members died in that home.

One psychologist believes Friday’s verdict may go a long way toward healing emotions.

Kept Memories Alive

“The trial has been a double-edged sword because it has dredged up a lot of memories,” said Patrick O’Connor, director of the county’s Rio Hondo Mental Health Center in Cerritos. “But it may also act like a closure, the end of traumatic experience. The verdict brings a sense of finality to the whole thing.”

Prendiz wants to believe that. She and her husband and two children rebuilt and moved back to the neighborhood a year ago. At night, when she hears a plane overhead, she remembers the family photos and mementos she lost.

“In the end, we sat down as a family and talked long and hard about leaving,” she recalled. “But this is our home. This is where are children were born. Our ties to this neighborhood are too strong. It is our home.”