Drawing on Their Memories : Kindergartners Cope With Teacher’s Death in Small-Plane Crash

The kindergartners in Mildred Vail’s class crafted memories of their teacher Monday in bright crayon drawings and spare phrases.

“Mrs. Vail was in an airplane and she died and she crashed and she turned into an angel,” one child wrote.

Officials at Fryberger Elementary School told the 66 kindergartners as class began that their teacher had been a passenger in a plane that had crashed into a hillside last week along the Orange-Riverside county line, killing the 56-year-old Laguna Niguel woman and her longtime boyfriend, Pablo Molo, 63, of Costa Mesa.

“I told them she wouldn’t come through the door anymore, but that she would be in our hearts,” said Judy O’Neil, Vail’s co-teacher and friend for more than 30 years.

After O’Neil and Principal Geniavon Pickett delivered the news, the children gathered in small groups assisted by counselors and parents and began drawing pictures of Vail. Some drew Snow White, because Vail had been that costume character at Disneyland while she was in college, O’Neil said.

Some children recalled the last time they saw her, at the school’s Easter egg hunt and hat parade just before spring break.

“For a lot, that’s their last memory of her,” O’Neil said. “And then she ran out the door and said she was getting on a plane.”

It wasn’t unusual for Molo to take Vail on short vacations in the 210 Cessna he flew. O’Neil said they would travel to Catalina and Las Vegas, but their favorite spot was Laughlin, Nev., where she spent her spring break.

“And she was good. She would always come back with money,” O’Neil said with a laugh.

Molo was an aviation enthusiast who emigrated from Argentina in 1968, said his nephew, Hernan Bottazzi. He was a professional pilot in Argentina and then landed a job as an engineer with McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, Bottazzi said.

“He loved flying,” Bottazzi said. “He loved the sky.”

The accident came as a shock to Bottazzi because, he said, Molo was so experienced.

“I used to fly around Orange County with him when he was doing his hours of pilot training,” he said. “He knew so much about planes.”

In his youth, Bottazzi said, his uncle liked to hang glide and skydive.

“He was a crazy guy,” Bottazzi said. “He was fun, and everyone who knew him loved him.”

Investigators believe the plane crashed Wednesday, but the wreckage was not discovered until Friday morning. One fire captain said the plane missed clearing the hillside by about 20 feet.

Vail, the mother of two grown children, had been seeing Molo for more than six years, said Peter Chlebek of La Mirada, who once lived next door to her in Laguna Niguel.

“She was a really neat lady,” he said. “She was always very bubbly and positive. And with some of the things I was going through in life, she’d help out with that.” O’Neil said she and Vail attended Whittier College together in the 1960s, and during those years, “I had to serve chicken at Knott’s Berry Farm, while she got to be Snow White at Disneyland.”

Both later taught at Stacey Intermediate School in Huntington Beach.

This was the first year Vail had taught a kindergarten class, and O’Neil said the first few weeks were tough, especially after teaching language arts, computers and yearbook to junior high students for five years.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to try kindergarten,’ and she did and she loved it,” she said.

Raquel Cardona, the mother of one of Vail’s 5-year-old students, said Vail was close to the children.

“Sometimes the parents are late picking up their kids and they would have to sit in the office, but she let the kids in her class,” Cardona said. “My son knew he could go in the class and play, and she hugged the kids a lot.”

Vail was fluent in Spanish and was taking her fifth year of that language at Saddleback College. She also was a computer whiz, some said.

“Some of these kids ended up knowing more about the computer than me,” said O’Neil’s classroom aide, Sonia Gomez-Vu.

O’Neil said her friend had been looking forward to teaching her own class alone next year and to graduation this spring.

“It’s going to be tough,” she said.