From All Walks of Life, Victims United in Death

They were a varied bunch. A businessman, a high school senior, even an air traffic controller returning home from a business trip to Atlantic City, N.J.

On Friday evening, just before 6, they came together at Los Angeles International Airport, clambering up a steep stairway into a slender Metroliner with two engines and 19 seats. The flight was SkyWest 5569, bound for Palmdale, 60 miles away.

Minutes later, before the 10 passengers buckled into the tiny craft even had a chance to get acquainted, their journey ended. A USAir Boeing 737, arriving from Columbus, Ohio, slammed into the small plane, flattening it in an explosion of flames.

Passengers on the larger aircraft had time to race for emergency exits, to make a frantic leap from a wing and flee to safety. There were no such opportunities for those flying with SkyWest. Only seconds after impact, the commuter plane had vanished, its wreckage buried beneath the smoking hulk of the USAir jet.

SkyWest’s 10 passengers died instantly, as did the pilot, Andrew J. Lucas, and the first officer, Frank C. Prentice III, both based in San Luis Obispo.

As investigators prowled the charred wreckage of the two planes Saturday, relatives of the victims struggled to cope with their loss as friends came by with casseroles and consolation.

SkyWest declined to release a passenger list, but in interviews, relatives of several people aboard the commuter plane tearfully remembered their loved ones, relating details that suddenly seemed important. The wife of one victim recalled that her husband took out traveler’s insurance just before leaving on his weeklong business trip. A second victim had harbored a nagging fear of commuter jets, despite his years of flying for business purposes.

At SkyWest Airlines, a 20-year-old company that employs 1,300 people, officials were also struggling with tragedy. In addition to the two crew members aboard Flight 5569, the Utah-based airline lost its Palmdale station manager and the husband of another Palmdale-based SkyWest employee--both of whom were passengers on the plane.

“We are a very close-knit family at SkyWest,” said Kristan Norton, an airline spokeswoman in St. George, Utah. “We are grieving today.”

They were grieving in Palmdale as well. Many of the 10 travelers aboard the aircraft apparently were residents of the burgeoning city on the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County.

Among them was Krishani Srijaerajah, 17. A senior at Paraclete High School, a private Catholic school near Lancaster. Srijaerajah had flown alone from Palmdale to Los Angeles on Friday morning for an interview at Mt. St. Mary’s College, which had made her a scholarship offer. She was returning home Friday evening, on Flight 5569.

Srijaerajah’s parents were in Toronto for the wedding of another relative. But her uncle, Kulam Kulasingam of Lancaster, was waiting for his niece Friday at Palmdale airport. By midnight, he knew he need not wait any longer.

“They said no survivors from the plane,” Kulasingam said soberly as he walked from the terminal into the chill night air. “She is gone.”

On Saturday, the principal told some of the students and faculty at Paraclete High of the young woman’s death.

“I think everyone’s in shock,” said Judy Steinberg, the school’s academic counselor. “She was a bright, lovely young lady, and we are certainly going to miss her.”

Scott Gilliam, another passenger killed in the crash, was an air traffic controller for the Federal Aviation Administration, based in Palmdale. Gilliam, 33, had been away on a business trip in Atlantic City all week and was expected home around 8 p.m. Friday, his wife, Connie, said.

Connie Gilliam was folding laundry when she heard a bulletin about the crash of a plane from Columbus, Ohio. For the next hour, as news reports of the crash trickled in, she seesawed between hope and dread.

“At first I wasn’t terribly concerned,” Gilliam said Saturday. “He was not coming from Ohio, not taking USAir.”

Then word came that a smaller aircraft had been involved, a SkyWest plane. Gilliam’s mood grew grim. Only two airlines serve Palmdale. She knew SkyWest was one of them.

“I just screamed and cried, ‘Oh no!’ ”

Gilliam, a father of two young children and active in his church, was well-liked and respected by his fellow air traffic controllers, said George Williams, air traffic manager at Palmdale Regional Airport.

“He was an outstanding controller and human being, very professional,” Williams said. Some of Gilliam’s co-workers, Williams added, broke into tears Friday night when they learned of his death.

On Saturday, as friends drifted in and out of her two-story Palmdale home, Gilliam reminisced about her brawny, curly haired husband. Going through her recollections, she mentioned his bout with cancer seven years ago.

Gilliam also remembered a prophetic conversation she had with her husband just days before the crash. In a phone call from New Jersey, Scott told her of a traveler’s insurance policy he had taken out just before his trip. Don’t worry, he assured his wife, the policy was just a precaution, “in case anything ever happens to me.”

Edwin Reid was a seasoned business traveler who was returning Friday from a two-day trip to Phoenix. Week-in, week-out, the 38-year-old commercial leasing agent from Palmdale climbed aboard flights as a representative of the Melvin Simon Corp., a company that owns shopping malls through the Western United States. Reid’s wife, Lois, figured that he logged more than 20,000 miles a month in the air.

The hours spent aboard planes, however, didn’t exempt Reid from a lurking uneasiness about flying, his wife said. It was the commuter flights that concerned him the most.

“We talked about his flying and he knew that commuter planes had a higher rate of accidents,” Lois Reid said of her husband of 16 years. “But I don’t think he ever thought that something like this could happen.”

Reid, an avid hunter and fisherman, made up for his trips away from home by always being playful and loving with his two daughters and son, who range in age from 6 to 8.

“He was extremely kind and affectionate,” Lois Reid said Saturday from her home in a Palmdale subdivision. “He was a loving father and husband.

“We had made a lot of plans and had a lot of dreams,” Lois Reid said tearfully. “Now they are not the same. I will take everything one day at a time. . . . Right now there are hills and valleys, but we want to remember what a good man my husband was.”

Michael Fuller, 30, was Sky-West’s station manager in Palmdale. He was returning Friday from a weeklong SkyWest management seminar in Palm Springs. Flight 5569 was to bring him home.

“He was an exemplary individual in every sense of the word,” SkyWest spokesman Steve Hart said of Fuller, who began working for SkyWest in May, 1986, in Cedar City, Utah.

Fuller’s wife, Karen, 28, saw news of the crash that killed her husband on television Friday night. Her parents immediately drove the 6 1/2 hours from their home in Cedar City to be with their daughter, who is a substitute teacher, and their grandchildren, 23-month-old Dustin and Melissa, age 4.

“I think we’ve given up flying,” Fuller’s mother-in-law, Marian Ashdown, said Saturday.

Times staff writer Iris Schneider contributed to this article.