Tragedy Touches Home

Tony Silberfeld collapsed in his father’s arms Friday at Los Angeles International Airport. His best friend was dead. Why, he asked his father, had he lived?

While the Silberfelds sought answers, a continent away, workers continued searching the waters off New York for the remains of Yon Rojany--whom Tony had been planning to travel with in Europe. Rojany, who had attended Birmingham High School in Van Nuys with Silberfeld, perished along with 13 other Los Angeles-area residents aboard TWA Flight 800 when it exploded shortly after takeoff Wednesday.

Rojany, strapping at 6 feet tall and brimming with life, had begged his father for a trip to Italy. The 19-year-old, a former varsity basketball and tennis player at Birmingham High, had arranged to try out for several Italian professional basketball teams.

Tony Silberfeld decided to accompany him.

Neither had been scheduled to take Flight 800. But at the last minute, TWA canceled the first leg of their trip. The friends separated at Los Angeles International Airport.

Yon eventually wound up on Flight 800, while Tony, whose father did not want him to take a U.S. airline to Europe for fear of terrorism, boarded an Alitalia plane. It saved his life.

Other Southland victims were a Garden Grove pilot who was at the controls of the 747 when it plunged into the sea, a Bel-Air family of four headed to a bat mitzvah in Israel, and a 17-year-old Fairfax High School graduate planning to tour Italy with her uncle, a famous musician.

Rojany’s parents said their son got the idea to play basketball in Europe when he was waiting tables at a Brentwood restaurant and met Larry Brown, coach of the Indiana Pacers.

Rojany’s father, Shimon, questioned his son about the merits of following the basketball dream in place of getting a job. But in the end, the elder Rojany relented, even paying for his son’s plane ticket and a Eurail train pass.

“Even though I sent him, I have no remorse because I know he went with a smile,” Shimon Rojany said of his son, who most recently lived in Westwood and attended Santa Monica College.

“He was just like a flower just starting to blossom. All of a sudden he was politically attuned, asking me a lot of questions about Israel and the elections.”

Rojany’s mother, Lisa Michelson, said her oldest son, Eric, took the loss particularly hard.

“What Eric said to me last night was: ‘I wanted Yon to be the best man at my wedding and to grow old with him,’ ” Michelson said. “Half my heart I feel is dead and the other half I feel is broken for my other son.”

Tony Silberfeld came home Friday, wrapping himself in his father’s arms and fighting back tears.

“I feel much better now,” his father said after giving him a long hug in a crowded terminal at Los Angeles International Airport.

Those less fortunate spent Friday grieving their losses.

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Maria Lucien retreated into the bedroom of her daughter, Dalila, who graduated from Fairfax High School in June and was preparing to attend Parsons Art School in New York in the fall.

The 17-year-old artist was traveling to Italy with her aunt, Ana Marie Shorter, wife of jazz composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter. They were going to tour with Shorter, who was planning to finance his niece’s education.

Maria Lucien thumbed through the brightly colored paintings her daughter left behind, some of them self-portraits.

She showed visitors the bedroom walls, decorated with black and white pictures of jazz legends such as Billie Holiday and sweet scribblings about love and life.

“Am I seducing or being seduced?” Dalila Lucien wrote on one wall. A few feet away, beneath a picture of a green frog, she wrote in French, “Ma Petite Grenoville.”

Family members recalled Lucien’s style: her vintage dresses of green and black velvet hanging on a rack in the room, her thick brown mane of hair in which she took so much pride.

“I love her with a passion,” said her mother, who lost another daughter in a drowning accident 17 years ago. “She was my sunshine, my breath. She was so pure, saving herself for love.”

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There was no one left to grieve at the Eugene Silverman household in Bel-Air, only a security guard keeping watch over an empty house.

Silverman, his wife, Etta, and their two daughters all perished in a flight they never intended to take. The Silvermans had planned to fly from New York to Rome for a week’s vacation before heading to Israel to attend a friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah.

But they were placed on the Paris-bound flight at the last moment because an under-booked flight from New York to Rome was canceled, said Jerry Rabow, a family friend and law partner of Silverman.

Silverman, 54, was a prominent tax attorney and a partner in the Westwood firm of De Castro, West & Chodorow. Lawyers at the office showed up for work Friday but spent their time talking about the Silverman family.

They marveled at Silverman’s 30-year career that included jobs with the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. attorney’s office.

The family attended Stephen Wise Temple, and their youngest daughter, 15-year-old Jamie, was a student at the temple’s day school. Their oldest daughter, 22-year-old Candace, had recently graduated from USC with a double major in psychology and English, earning honors in the latter.

Rabow recalled the Silvermans as a warm and loving family.

“They had a remarkable capacity to make friends,” Rabow said. “We were speculating if anyone could name an enemy Gene had made, and no one could.”

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The mother of another crash victim also spent Friday recalling the best of her son, Ralph G. Kevorkian, one of the pilots of Flight 800. Kevorkian, 58, grew up in Glendale and was the only son of Flora Headley.

“When you’re in that plane,” he once told his mother, “and you look out the window, you feel so free, like a bird, out there by yourself.”

Kevorkian loved planes and flying from earliest childhood, Headley said, enlisting her help building models when neither of them could even name the parts.

“He was always a pilot in his heart,” she said.

The two of them had a deal: If there were ever an accident involving a TWA plane, Kevorkian, who worked for the airline for 31 years, would call and let Headley know he was OK.

“When I heard the news about the crash, I waited an hour, then two hours,” she said. “So then we called TWA and confirmed it. But I already knew it in my heart.”

Also contributing to this story were staff writers Lisa Leff, Timothy Williams, Henry Chu and Efrain Hernandez Jr., and special correspondent Steve Ryfle.