Father’s Concerns About Terrorism Save Son’s Life

Tony Silberfeld came home Friday and collapsed in his father’s arms 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--Tony’s best friend from their days at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. Rojany perished along with 13 other Los Angeles-area residents aboard TWA Flight 800 when it exploded soon after takeoff Wednesday.

Rojany, strapping at 6 feet tall and brimming with a life just beginning, 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.

Silberfeld decided to accompany him.

Neither had been scheduled to take Flight 800. But at the last minute, TWA canceled a leg of their trip. The friends separated at Los Angeles International Airport. Rojany switched to Flight 800, while Silberfeld, whose father did not want him to take a U.S. airline for fear of terrorism, boarded an Alitalia plane. It saved his life.

Others who died in the air disaster included:

-- Eugene Silverman, his wife, Etta, and their daughters, Candace and Jamie, of Brentwood, who were killed on a flight they, like Rojany, never intended to take.

-- Dalila Lucien, a 17-year-old Fairfax High School graduate who was on her way to Italy, and her aunt, Ana Maria Shorter of Studio City, wife of jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

-- Ralph Kevorkian, a 58-year-old career pilot who grew up in Glendale and was piloting the doomed craft. Kevorkian was the only son of Flora Headley, who lives in Montrose, near Glendale, and raised him as a single mother.

“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. He asked her to help build airplane models back when neither of them could even name the parts they were putting together.

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

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

“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.”

At the Lucien home just blocks from Fairfax High, family members huddled in 17-year-old Lucien’s room, burning candles and thumbing through paintings the budding artist had recently completed.

“The child is like your guts,” said her mother, Maria Lucien. “It’s like someone pulls a life from you. It’s so rough.”

Maria Lucien had already lost one child. In 1979, her 2 1/2-year-old daughter fell into a pool in Van Nuys and drowned. She focused her energies on Dalila and her other children, nurturing Dalila’s love of art and the jazz music played by her uncle, Wayne Shorter, and her jazz singer father, Jon Lucien.

Dalila Lucien, like many others on Flight 800, was initially scheduled to take a direct flight to Italy, where she and her aunt, Ana Maria Shorter, planned to see Wayne Shorter perform.

The flight was canceled, and the pair were booked through Paris on TWA instead.

Unlike the Lucien home, so filled with grief, there was no one left to mourn at the Eugene Silverman household in Bel-Air. A security guard kept watch over an empty house.

The Silvermans planned to fly from New York to Rome for a week’s vacation before heading to Israel to attend the bat mitzvah of a friend’s daughter.

They were placed on the Paris-bound flight at the last moment when their underbooked 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.

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.”

The Silverman family perished together, but the Rojanys will try to move on together, with one missing.

Shimon Rojany, Yon’s father, said their ordeal was compounded Wednesday and Thursday as TWA changed its story several times about whether Yon was on the flight. On Thursday morning, a niece in Paris confirmed he was one of the passengers, but the airline called and said he was not. By late afternoon, TWA had called again.

Yes, the representative said, Yon was killed.

Oddly, Lisa Michaelson, his mother, wasn’t surprised.

“We all see disasters happen on the news, and you watch them with a certain amount of detachment,” she said. “When this one happened, I somehow knew.”

Confirmation was harder to come by for the family of Tony Silberfeld.

“We didn’t know--we didn’t know anything,” Roman Silberfeld, Tony’s father, said. In their darkest moments, said his stepmother, Pat Silberfeld, they wondered if Tony and Yon had met up again in New York and decided to fly together.

Incredibly, Roman Silberfeld was on the phone with an Alitalia ticket agent in Rome at about 3 a.m. Thursday, hours after the crash, when Tony happened to walk by the agent.

“Silberfeld,” the agent was saying into the phone, trying to get the name right. “Silberfeld.”

“Is that call for me?” Tony asked.

A moment later, he was speaking to his father. Alive.

But Yon, his father told him, hadn’t made it.

Tony stood there at the airport in Rome, alone, digesting the news as his family clung together in Los Angeles.

Then he came home.