Survivors Deserve Decency

I was standing in the dusty airfield with two other Times reporters late last month, wrapping up for the day, when the Guilford family drove up in a station wagon.

Eight hours earlier, a plane carrying sky divers had crashed on takeoff at the Perris Valley Airport, killing 16 people, including the pilot, and seriously injuring six others. We had spent all day chronicling the aftermath, and exhaustion was starting to set in.

It was dusk, and the white tail of the plane--jutting up in the air at an impossible angle--was luminescent in the ink-colored sky. Its nose was still embedded in the ground, where it had disintegrated on impact.

The bodies had been removed. The investigators were gone. The TV crews had cleared out. The three of us were discussing absurd details of the story, trying to identify the plants in the grassy field where the plane had crashed so we could phone in that colorful detail to editors in Los Angeles.

We decided upon “foxtails and mustard grass” and were about to leave for the night when LeRoy Guilford drove up in his station wagon. Guilford stayed in the car while his wife and two of their sons walked over to the wreckage, where they stood silently, hand in hand, in the foxtails and mustard grass.

Guilford began to tell us about the pilot--his older brother, Rowland, whom they called Rody. Rody was 44 when he died and had flown since he was 16. How he was so meticulous a pilot that his passengers got bored during safety checks. How Rody was the “father” to his three younger siblings as they grew up in Anaheim after their parents divorced. How he had left a wife and five children in Riverside, ages 1 to 14, with no life insurance.

At first, I thought it was a macabre thing to do, bringing his family to view this horrible place.

But Guilford explained that he was doing it for his children. They had asked to see the plane, and he thought it might help them deal with their grief, “because they will remember the day their uncle died for the rest of their lives.” He hoped that maybe it would bring a bit of closure to an open wound.

His son, Christian, returned to the car ahead of his mother. The 10-year-old boy said his uncle died doing what he liked to do, and then he started to cry softly. His father put his arms around him and told us one other family detail. Christian’s first name is Rowland. He had been named after his Uncle Rody.

The National Transportation Safety Board would later say that five gallons of water had contaminated the fuel for the plane, which also turned out to be 1,600 pounds over its maximum takeoff weight. The problem was not Rowland Guilford at the plane’s controls.

As I listened to LeRoy Guilford reminisce about his brother, I thought about the scene earlier in the day at the airport’s sky-diving school, where others had gathered to grieve. Many had watched helplessly as the plane carrying their friends dove nose first into the ground 300 yards away. They ran to the wreckage, hoping to offer medical aid but found little more than a mass of crumpled bodies.

The men and women hugged each other and cried. They didn’t want to be bothered, so we let them grieve without interfering. We already had enough information for our story, enough human anguish.

But we noticed TV news crews weren’t using the same restraint. Some stuck microphones and cameras inches from their faces, asking, “How do you feel?” Some of the sky divers were so angry they yelled at the TV crews to leave, and some of the journalists shouted back that they had a right to be there. Someone threw a cameraman’s filter into the pool at the airport. Witnessing some of this, I wondered whether the purpose of some journalism was to be insightful or merely to incite.

I discussed this with the two other Times reporters, Scott Harris and Vic Merina, and we concluded that leaving the people alone was the right thing to do.

Even in print journalism, though, the anguish has to come through in a tragic story such as this one, and we made sure it did. We watched and listened and waited, carefully picking times to quietly talk to some of them.

Admittedly, it’s easier for reporters to seem like human beings when they don’t carry cameras and microphones. But, unlike many of the TV crews, when we recognized that we weren’t wanted, we honored the need for privacy.

For the Guilfords, talking to us seemed to help them a bit. But when we drove away that night, the family was still there. They huddled together for a moment, grieving in a public place, in their own private way.