Tustin Sky Diver’s Hunger for Danger Costs His Life : Accident: Navy corpsman’s family learns he is dead in Perris only after his body is finally identified.

Rolando Estante Dajay, 38, was a weekend daredevil with a penchant for scuba diving and motorcycling. This vacation, he wanted to try sky diving for the first time.

So, without a word to his family, the Tustin resident and Navy medic signed up for a course at the Perris Valley Sky Diving School.

He excitedly boarded a twin-engine plane Wednesday. Minutes after takeoff, the plane crashed nose-first into a grassy field at Perris Valley Airport, killing Dajay and 15 others. Six others remain hospitalized.

Dajay’s family learned the news only Friday--a day after authorities identified his body.

“Daddy’s gone! Daddy’s gone!” his wife, Paz Batilo Dajay, cried as she hugged the couple’s son, David, 3 1/2, in the living room of her Santa Ana condominium.

“I’ve been trying to warn him not to do these things,” she said, shaking her head. “He wants to be adventurous, and I don’t like it.”

The 44-year-old nurse said she and her husband of six years argued incessantly about his love of dangerous sports and had been separated for the past three months because of it.

The last time she saw him was Easter Sunday, when he dropped by to pick up their son for church. “He said he would like us to get together again,” she said. “He was apologetic. He wants to be adventurous.”

He never mentioned his plans to go sky diving.

But at the First Baptist Church on 17th Street, where he was a former president of the Filipino Fellowship, Rolando Dajay told friends that he was going parachuting Wednesday, the Rev. Mark Schipul recalled.

Dajay was one of three novices aboard a plane full of veteran divers, said Jim Wallace, chief instructor at the Perris Valley Sky Diving School.

Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash. The passengers were not wearing seat belts. Dajay died of multiple traumatic injuries, according to an autopsy.

For two days, family members tried to reach him at his Tustin apartment and wondered why no one answered. Only some family members--such as Letty Lazag, Rolando Dajay’s sister-in-law--were aware of the crash.

“I knew about the plane crash in Perris, but I only had a look on the news,” Lazag said. “I didn’t give it any attention, because it was not so very important to me.”

As she held a newspaper with an article about the crash, Paz Dajay said: “Even as I’m reading this, it doesn’t register in my brain.”

Lt. Cmdr. Steve Chesser, a Navy spokesman, said that Dajay was on vacation and that military officials did not know about his death until late Thursday.

“The problem was he was on leave when this happened,” Chesser said. “When a person is coming in to work every day, then when he doesn’t show we know something’s up. This way, we didn’t even know.”

Dajay, a devout Christian with four college degrees, was a Navy water safety and scuba instructor who also taught pilots at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station how to act in emergencies, his wife said. He had been stationed at the base since 1989.

He was recruited by the Navy in 1973 as a teen-ager in his hometown of Ilo Ilo, in the southern Philippines, she said. He said goodby to his parents, two brothers and four sisters and became a U.S. citizen.

He moved around the country frequently with the Navy, living in Hawaii and Philadelphia before settling in Orange County 12 years ago. In time, he petitioned to bring his parents to this country. They and a brother and four sisters now live in Southern California.

During the Gulf War, Dajay was a hospital first classman in Bahrain for seven months and transported the wounded to care centers. In letters to his wife, the medic appeared eager to fight.

“I was told there is a possibility for me to go to the front line as a search and rescue corpsman,” he wrote.

After almost 20 years of service, he hoped to retire next year and was attending a seminary to become a minister.

“He planned to go home to the Philippines to be a missionary,” family friend Grace Daclan said. “He felt he got the calling to serve the Lord by being a missionary in the Philippines.”

In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by two daughters from a previous marriage, ages 16 and 14.