Crash Victims’ Families, Friends Visit Scene of Tragedy

Mourners stood atop a levee in the Everglades and cried Wednesday in an emotional farewell to relatives and friends who perished in the middle of a watery saw-grass prairie 300 yards away. And that may be as near as they ever get to closure.

“We couldn’t actually see the spot,” said Gerald Walker, whose 38-year-old wife, Delmarie, was one of 110 people who died Saturday when ValuJet Flight 592 plunged into the marsh minutes after taking off from Miami International Airport. “But now we have some idea of what they went through. We have some closure.”

Under the fading light of late afternoon, it was that hope for closure that led some 100 fathers, mothers, children and friends of the crash victims to get on four buses and travel 25 miles west of Miami for a memorial ceremony on top of the L67 canal, the nearest dry land to the place where divers have been picking up the shattered remains of their loved ones.

On the levee, the group prayed and placed a floral wreath and carnations on a wooden platform. One relative carried a large teddy bear to the levee and placed it in the center of the wreath. Another blue-and-white wreath was taken by airboat and tossed into the water over a crater carved out of peat, muck and limestone by the plummeting DC-9.

“We just experienced what can only be described as the most heart-wrenching trip any of us has ever taken,” said Wilfredo Alvarez, deputy director of the Metro-Dade County Fire Department, who accompanied the group. “But it was necessary.”

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Adezza Lameda came from Venezuela to pay tribute to her brother, Rafael Lameda, who lived in Cookville, Tenn. “I feel very bad because without a body and a funeral, the flowers are the only way” to say goodbye, she said.

Reporters were not permitted to go with the mourners, but television news helicopters followed the proceedings from above and a few of the participants shared their thoughts after returning to the Miami hotel where many have been staying.

Some declined to make the trip. “It was a dilemma for me,” said Dunbar Cornielle, whose sister died in the crash. “I wanted to go see for myself, but on the other hand, I didn’t think I could handle it.”

Those who did choose to go were given green lapel ribbons, bearing the flight number and date of the crash. They then took part in a ritual as unusual as almost everything else connected with the tragedy.

The ValuJet plane went down in a wilderness area just 30 miles from the downtown skyscrapers of a major American city and almost no one saw it. A man who happened to be fishing nearby dialed 911 on his cellular phone, however, and in a tape recording of his call released Wednesday, he can be heard saying that after the plane hit he “saw a tremendous cloud of dirt and mud go up into the air.”

Immediately after the crash, however, there seemed to be little visible trace of the jetliner.

But in the last four days, federal investigators and divers wading through a grisly soup of wreckage, body parts and jet fuel have been recovering the evidence of disaster.

“For most of these people, the Everglades are just hard to conceptualize,” said M. Virginia Cummock, a counselor who went with the group. “This helped.”

Gerald Walker Jr., 14, Delmarie Walker’s son, agreed.

“It helped a lot,” he said after getting off the bus back at the hotel. “At least I could look out toward where she was and we could see that. This will help me keep my mother in my heart.”

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Some of those returning from the memorial service brought back clumps of Everglades vegetation that they hoped to keep alive at home. Others planned to keep the green ribbons or the white carnations.

But for others, that is not enough. “My daughter doesn’t want to go home until she knows something, until she can have something of her mother’s,” said Gerald Walker of his daughter, Tiffany, 18. “So we’re going to stay for awhile.”