Survivor of Wall Collapse Recalls Dreamlike Feeling of Being Buried

Buried in rubble that covered her from head to toe, petrified that she would suffocate, Connie Chung said her first reaction was to scream. The teen-ager soon quieted, however, recognizing that the unnecessary expenditure of energy could cost dearly.

“I realized I was wasting oxygen, so I stopped,” Chung recalled Tuesday from her home in the Los Angeles County community of San Marino.

Chung, 15, is one of five church volunteers, all from the Los Angeles area, who survived an accident in Tijuana Saturday afternoon as the group labored to build a retaining wall for a Baptist church in a poor neighborhood. Two others, both women, were killed.

The volunteers, members of youth groups from two L.A.-area churches--the Korean Divine Light Presbyterian Church in San Gabriel and the Sierra Vista Baptist Church in Rancho Cucamonga--had been digging a 2-foot-deep ditch that was to serve as a foundation for the retaining wall. An adjoining hillside, its base apparently weakened by the excavation, collapsed on the group with little warning; tons of earthen debris rained down from above into the ditch where the seven were standing.

Chung suffered a broken left leg and extensive bruises. She survived, she says, because of a fortuitous air pocket that allowed her to breathe while rescuers hastened to reach her head and give her access to fresh air.

The two who perished, both of asphyxiation, were Eui Shin Lim, 17, a high school senior from Alhambra, and Susan Kim, 21, a college student from San Gabriel. Their bodies were to be returned from Tijuana to California on Tuesday for a planned joint viewing and subsequent burial on Saturday.

As she waited for her colleagues to reach her, Chung says, she heard cries from her friend Susan Kim. It took the rescuers about 15-20 minutes to reach her head, a time that Chung, like other survivors of life-threatening incidents, remembers almost illusorily, so difficult was it to comprehend.

“I couldn’t really believe it was real,” said Chung, a sophomore at San Marino High School. “I was just praying.”

Once her head was cleared from the rubble, rescuers had to dig for another two hours to free the rest of her body. “I was just thankful I was alive,” she said.

Those who know them say both dead women were extraordinarily generous spirits. It was characteristic, acquaintances and relatives said, that they would donate their weekends to a charitable cause such as assisting a poor parish church in Mexico.

The volunteer group, consisting of perhaps 2 dozen workers, arrived Friday and planned to remain until Monday. Some had made the trip before, one of many U.S. church groups that do volunteer work in poor Tijuana communities, particularly on weekends.

“They were both beautiful ladies,” said the Rev. Bo Pil Suh, pastor of the Korean Divine Light Presbyterian Church in San Gabriel, where both deceased women and three of the injured were parishioners. “This is all so shocking; it’s very difficult to express how I feel right now.”

The tragedy has reverberated through the halls of Alhambra High School, where Eui Shin Lim was the senior homecoming queen, an honor student who was involved in a range of activities, from a singing group to organizing food drives for the homeless.

“This was a real special youngster; she touched all of us who knew her,” recalled Jay Vlasac, assistant principal at the school.

The other dead worker, Susan Kim, a student at California State University at Los Angeles, graduated from Alhambra High School in 1988.

On Sunday, Alhambra high plans to hold a Celebration of Life memorial program at the auditorium. Lim’s sister, Victoria, visited the school this week and spoke with grieving students, encouraging them to take some solace in her sister’s expansive spirit.

“I basically told them it was important for them to still smile and laugh, even though I know they’re having a hard time,” said Victoria Lim, 19, a sophomore at San Diego State University. “My sister died in a beautiful way. She was doing something good; she wasn’t shooting up or driving drunk. People should look at that.”

Another survivor, Bethany Marshall, 27, of Pasadena, remains at UC San Diego Medical Center with a crushed pelvis. The three other survivors--Rita Kim, 20, of Alhambra (no relation to Susan Kim); John Henkels, 39, of Rancho Cucamonga; and Mike Chung, 15, of Temple City (no relation to Connie Chung);--are recuperating at their homes after incurring less severe injuries.