Ventura County Chaplains Ready When Tragedy Strikes

On a coal-black rippling sea, photo albums, passports and baby clothes bobbed in the waves.

To many on the rescue boats, the presence of God must have seemed far off that cool January night, just a few hours after Alaska Airlines Flight 261 plunged from the sky.

Back on shore, Chaplain Larry Modugno pulled on his Ventura County Fire Department coat, buckled his helmet and got ready for work. Two other chaplains he had recruited for the Fire Department’s chaplain service did the same.

Ministers have been on call for the department since Modugno began the chaplaincy program six years ago. While fire crews douse flames and look for survivors, or homicide detectives search for answers, the chaplains stand by.

Some observe. Others search a victim’s eyes for emotional cues. It’s impossible to predict what response the chaplains will get in return. No two people react to instant tragedy the same way, the chaplains say.

Many of the bereaved have embraced the chaplains’ efforts to gather mortuary information or notify distant family members or serve as a spiritual advisor at the darkest of moments.

Their clientele includes the firefighters, who may choose to vent to a chaplain instead of bringing the emotional trauma home to their families.

“It does help because it puts everything in perspective,” said Ed Ornelas, a firefighter at Station 51 in Camarillo. “I am not a miracle worker. Being able to talk to somebody who is not involved in the rescue is beneficial. Some can talk to their spouses but others don’t have that luxury, and it makes us feel like our efforts are not in vain.”

Wanted or not, they will be there. And the chaplains’ styles are as different as the denominations they serve.

* Modugno, 56, is the quiet, calming deacon at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church in Camarillo. He is also a retired Ventura County sheriff’s deputy.

Name a horrific event, whether a random accident such as the tractor that overturned and crushed an Oxnard man last week or the 1999 slayings of three Santa Rosa Valley children, and most likely Modugno was there. Yet it wasn’t these or the many other tragic cases that got to Modugno, at least not completely.

It took eight crib deaths in one year--and the visits with the eight families--that forced Modugno “to get away and take a break from it” for a time.

* Lyn Thomas, 41, came to Ojai Valley Wesleyan Church by way of Azusa Pacific University and a farm in Forestburg, S.D. The soft-spoken pastor of the Ojai congregation looks like a low-key version of David Letterman.

He would rather forget his first call as a chaplain in 1996. His pager beeped and he soon was sitting in the home of an Ojai family whose 15-year-old daughter had hanged herself in a bedroom. Thomas had no tidy explanations that day for the family, nor does he now when a child dies in a pool or 88 plane passengers perish in the Pacific.

“There are no quick answers,” Thomas tells those dealing with sudden grief. “Other than to affirm that death is an invader and that it is not God’s plan.”

* Hyper and energetic to the point that his thoughts sometimes get ahead of his words, Rabbi John Sherwood of Oxnard has almost a messianic-like passion for helping others while they grieve. Ask Sherwood his style at a call and his answer is spoken like a man who grew up on the streets of New York City, which he did. “I shut up,” Sherwood said.

The 64-year-old former Los Angeles Police Department chaplain who counseled emotionally spent cops after the North Hollywood shootout in 1997 is a member of Temple Beth Torah in Ventura and rabbi emeritus at Temple Emet in Woodland Hills. “I’m not there to promote religion. I am there to help people,” he said. “Sometimes the best way to help someone is to keep a hand on their shoulder.”

* Close your eyes and it’s not hard to imagine Tom Wheeler giving the keynote speech at a Kiwanis Club dinner or Rotary luncheon. As a risk-management consultant, he is plugged in and chummy with officials from several Ventura County cities. He is also plugged in with the Mormon church in Moorpark. The 56-year-old Wheeler, a high priest with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, uses phrases such as “silent ministry” and “helping my brothers and sisters” when describing his approach to the chaplaincy. An able communicator, Wheeler is big on not saying much when he arrives at a call. Wheeler’s motto: The less said in those first moments, the better.

“You are there to observe and watch what is happening,” he said. “At a certain point in the grieving process, things calm down.”

Modugno also runs the nonprofit Ventura County Chaplaincy, which includes the 18 ministers who work with police and fire departments across the county.

He said he collects a 20-hour-per-week salary, though he routinely spends much more than that on the calls he will make at any time, day or night. The other three Fire Department chaplains work on a volunteer, on-call basis 24 hours a day. Also, Valerie De La Torre, a Presbyterian minister based in Port Hueneme, lends her services mostly when there is a need for a Spanish speaker.

Modugno and Wheeler answer most calls in the east end of the county. Sherwood takes the calls near Port Hueneme and Oxnard while Thomas handles Ojai and Ventura. The call for a chaplain usually comes from a battalion chief at the scene, Modugno said.

But on the night of Jan. 31, it didn’t take such a call to get three of four chaplains to the Alaska Airlines crash scene--they came racing as soon as they heard.

Thomas, who wound up spending a week at the recovery site in Port Hueneme, remembers busloads--seven of them--of family members, arriving in the days after the crash. Sherwood was at the scene as well. Wheeler was on standby to handle calls unrelated to the crash.

Emergency crews worked nonstop hauling bodies, possessions and chunks of plane from the ocean. On shore, the chaplains held debriefing sessions to evaluate the stress and emotional toll on the crews. Some sought out the chaplains, Modugno said. Others chose to talk among themselves or with family members about what they had seen.

“A lot of us would rather just not talk to them [chaplains], but I’m sure a lot of people like what they do,” said Dennis Witzke, a Ventura County firefighter at Station 54 in Camarillo who rode on one of the first boats searching for survivors after the plane crash.

“I have seen some pretty intense incidents, but I have a pretty good relationship with my wife and I usually share those things with her.”

It was a tough job that night, all the chaplains said.

What do you tell someone with three kids of his own who has just pulled the body of a child from the water? Or how to counsel a man who began the evening fishing for squid and ended it pulling a crash victim’s passport from the water?

Such was the situation facing Modugno and his crew as they met with rescue crews at an emergency operations center and makeshift morgue at the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Port Hueneme, now the Naval Base Ventura County.

“It was difficult for the young Navy personnel and fire personnel that had to go in the water,” Modugno said. “The personal effects that came up . . . it was real people. It was families.”

And while the crash was of a magnitude no one had seen before in Ventura County, the reactions rarely change. Neither does the job of a chaplain.

Last Monday, Abelardo Menendez and Ladislao Najera Esparza were on a tractor clearing horse trails in the Santa Rosa Valley when Menendez lost control of the tractor. He was able to jump free but Esparza, the father of two children, was crushed to death by a piece of the tractor.

Within an hour, Modugno and auxiliary chaplain De La Torre were at the scene. Modugno briefed arriving emergency personnel as De La Torre leaned over the firetruck cab where the dazed Menendez sat. As rescue crews removed his friend’s body, Menendez spoke quietly in Spanish with De La Torre.

In November a fast-moving fire tore through the Shadow Hills apartments in Thousand Oaks, leaving hundreds of low-income families searching for shelter and a meal.

Modugno and the other chaplains, who were at the scene, soon began organizing a holiday party for the dozens of children left homeless by the blaze.

Since Thanksgiving, the chaplains and firefighters have been delivering donated toys and clothes to the motel where the families are staying.

“They [the families] are in need of some hope,” said Lisa Safaeinili, a spokeswoman for the Many Mansions housing group, which managed Shadow Hills. The chaplains helped provide that hope, she said.

“They are discouraged and it’s really hard, especially at the holiday time. Providing them with [clothes and toys] will give them things that will rebuild their lives.”