TWA Victim Finally Laid to Rest

Brent Richey reached for each day with the fury of a man who understood life’s passing nature.

By age 26, he had earned two bachelor’s degrees, interned for a U.S. senator, worked as a sportswriter, started his own business and completed three years of law school. He found spare time where others couldn’t, playing bass in a church band, even coaching a Van Nuys softball team while working at a law firm and taking classes at Loyola Law School.

On the day he died, Richey was on his way to a dream wedding in Florence, Italy, side by side with his fiancee. They perished aboard TWA Flight 800 with 230 others in the fiery disaster off of Long Island.

On Friday, more than a year after the explosion, he was finally laid to rest beside his fiancee in Ventura’s Ivy Lawn Memorial Park.

Authorities could not identify his remains until last week--a delay that prevented family and friends from putting the tragedy behind them.

“It does bring a sense of closure,” said his mother, Shirley Anderson of Ventura. “Life goes on.”

It was during memorial ceremonies in Long Island on July 17 that Anderson and her husband, Rob, learned her son’s body had been identified. She hadn’t been to the disaster site before, opting instead to find solace in friends and family at home.

Although New York resurrected her grief, ultimately she found comfort in the families of the other victims.

“It was like reopening it and bringing it all to the surface again,” she said. “But the five days we spent in New York had a very healing effect on us.”

During Friday’s graveside service, two dozen family members and friends laid red carnations on Richey’s casket, remembering not whom they lost, but what they gained from knowing him.

“Today, we can put to closure, each of us in our own way, what was started a year ago,” said the Rev. Mark Steele of the Ventura Missionary Church. “Today, we can once again remember Brent for his love of life, for his many accomplishments in a short period of time, for his inspiration in our life.”

Born in New Jersey and raised in Wichita, Kan., Richey moved to Salt Lake City with his mother, where he graduated from high school with honors and won a scholarship to Southern Utah University.

In 2 1/2 years, he earned bachelor’s degrees in political science and social science while working as a local sports correspondent for the Associated Press.

In 1990, he worked as an intern for former Utah Sen. Jake Garn in Washington.

*

After graduation, he moved to Ventura with his mother and stepfather, working for an Oxnard law firm until he entered Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

He attended classes at night and worked by day at a Century City law firm.

He made the dean’s list while writing for the student entertainment law review. And with two friends--David Ben-Meir and Paul Raehpour--he founded a company, Vision Telecommunications, selling long-distance service and telephone cards. The trio hoped to use the company to finance their dream of launching a Hollywood movie studio.

On weekends, he played bass guitar for church youth groups while coaching and playing for an adult softball team in Van Nuys.

“He pitched,” said Ben-Meir, who also was Richey’s law school classmate. “He’s gotta have the ball, you know what I mean? We liked him having the ball.

“It was funny. Whatever he talked about, whatever he was interested in, whatever he did, he always inspired confidence in other people.”

Getting married was very important to Richey, Ben-Meir recalled, and he wanted to do something special for his 27-year-old girlfriend, Seana Anderson. They had met over the telephone five years earlier while working at separate law firms. Anderson, friends remembered, brought out the playful side of a determined young man.

On Christmas Day, 1995, he gave his sweetheart an empty picture frame.

She was puzzled. Just what would she put in it?

“Our wedding photograph,” he told her.

The couple decided to get married in Italy the following summer. As the couple boarded the ill-fated flight, they were waiting to close escrow on a home in Castaic.

Anderson’s body was recovered amid the wreckage within days of the disaster.

In February, Richey’s mother filed a $1-million wrongful death claim against TWA and Boeing. It was filed more out of the necessity to meet a statute of limitations deadline than out of bitterness, she said.

*

Attorneys and law firms had sent her many letters offering legal representation, envelopes she stuffed into her drawer until after her first Christmas without her son.

“It’s not vengeance or anything,” she said. “I just wish someone would have filled up the gas tank, which is a simple thing. It could have avoided all this.”

Although the cause of the disaster is still unknown, investigators suspect that a volatile mixture of jet fuel and air was ignited by static electricity in a partially filled center fuel tank.

“It’s a loss for all of us, not just me,” she said. “He touched a lot of lives and had a major impact on a lot of people.”

Ben-Meir said he hoped the identification of Richey’s body would help everyone who knew him find closure.

“There was something left open,” he said. “You always wondered if he was out on a remote island someplace. It’s like this weird thing you might dream up, because it hasn’t ended entirely. It does kind of put that to rest. I’m just glad he’s home.”