‘I Saw Things I’d Rather Not Talk About’

John Diaz remembers thinking he needed to find his passport, wallet and carry-on bag. Then he thought: “What do I need my bag for? I’m dead anyway.”

But in the midst of fire and smoke and screams, he grabbed it.

“I saw people die. I saw some things I’d rather not talk about,” he said Tuesday night from a Taipei hotel after the crash of a Singapore Airlines jumbo jet in Taiwan.

“All this jet fuel was being sprayed around like balls of fire. Everything these balls of fire touched instantly combusted,” he said.

And because he had taken his cellular phone on Flight 006, Diaz, 50, was able to call his wife in Santa Monica minutes after the plane crashed during takeoff.

Not all relatives of passengers on the jumbo jet were so lucky.

William Dwan of Canyon Country still didn’t know late Tuesday night if his wife, Jenny Dwan, was alive. Dwan said that he had called the airline’s 1-800 number for information about his wife several times but that officials told him they would contact him when they knew more.

“I feel very bad. I’m kind of upset,” said Dwan, 45. “They should have told us something.”

Nor had the family of Michael Peng of Covina learned his fate.

“We’re talking to [the airline] now, trying to leave messages,” Peng’s brother Tim said. “The only information we have obtained is from the Internet.” Michael Peng, who works for AT&T; in Chino, was returning from a short vacation visiting his parents in Taiwan.

A Taiwanese civil aviation official said 79 people died in the crash, 56 were hospitalized and 44 had minor or no injuries.

Nearly a day after the disaster, there was little official information for anguished loved ones of the 47 American passengers aboard.

But as officials of Singapore Airlines tried to console victims’ families around the world, some people, including Diaz’s wife in Santa Monica, were getting details from survivors with cell phones.

In a phone conversation moments before takeoff, Diaz told his wife, Nancy Louise Jones, 48, that he was angry with himself for boarding the plane scheduled to depart in strong winds and torrential rain.

Less than an hour later, she was surprised to receive a second call from Diaz. “Honey, I’ve been in a plane crash. The plane didn’t make it but I’m OK.”

In an interview in their Santa Monica artist’s studio/loft, Jones, who had spoken with her husband eight times in 12 hours, said: “The plane was totally destroyed, and he got out. . . . It’s a miracle. . . . Thank God for cell phones.”

In a telephone interview, Diaz, an executive with the San Diego Internet music firm MP3.com, said he had a bad feeling even before boarding the ill-fated plane.

“There was a heavy storm going on, so I couldn’t believe they were actually going to take off,” Diaz recalled. “In fact, all day long I’d asked the hotel concierge to call Singapore Airlines and ask if they were going to cancel the flight.”

Later, he peppered flight attendants in the airport lounge with similar questions. “They laughed and said: ‘No problem. We always take off in weather like this,’ ” he said.

“The plane started to lift and then bang! It felt like we ran into a brick wall. Everything jostled hard,” he said. “It felt like we’d hit something [coming down]. . . . Then, all hell broke loose.”

Diaz said he looked down and saw the plane’s carriage tear apart as the cabin filled with thick black smoke.

Yet, he said, “there was a strange clarity that went along with the event. Everything became crystal clear and moved in slow motion.”

Diaz grabbed his bag and jumped into the aisle. He joined survivors trying to find their way to the door and open it. But the hatch, they discovered, “was jammed shut.”

“I threw my weight against it, and it popped open,” he said.

No sooner had he leaped out of the plane than the landing slide deployed and “I got caught up in it. So there I was, off of the burning plane but wondering if I was about to get barbecued in a plastic bag.”

Diaz started running. The heat at his back was intense.

Rem Phang, 56, of Fresno, did not escape the fire uninjured. Phang was returning from a visit to his hometown in Cambodia when the plane crashed. Pulled from the wreckage with burns over a third of his body, he was hospitalized.

“A doctor there called us this morning,” said Phang’s son, Suben Phang. “It came as a real shock.”

Suben Phang said he wasn’t able to talk with his father by phone, “but the doctor told us that he seems like he’s going to be OK.”

He said the trip had been very important for his father, giving the elder Phang a chance to visit the area where he survived the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge before emigrating to the United States in 1983.

“It was very hard for him to live through all that,” the son said. “He still has nightmares about it.”

Lori Dabir said she was getting her two children ready for Halloween festivities at school Tuesday morning when the phone rang at her San Francisco home. “It was my husband, Massoud,” she said. “He said he’d been in a plane crash.”

She said Massoud Dabir, 41, was returning from a business trip.

“But he said that as the plane was taking off, it hit something really big. He didn’t know what it was,” Lori Dabir said.

She said that the plane began burning and that the upstairs business class section where her husband was sitting filled rapidly with smoke.

“Someone handed him a wet washcloth,” she said. “He put it over his face, and he rolled down the stairs. He said that when he got to the lower level, people were burning, screaming. Children were dying. Somehow, they got an exit door open and he got out.”

And somehow, she said, her husband escaped serious injury.

Family and friends of survivors David L. Ralph of Palmdale and Christina Reed of Rosamond gathered at Antelope Valley Christian School in Lancaster, where they both work, to comfort one another.

Ralph, 54, an associate professor of marketing at Pepperdine University who founded the Christian school in 1988, and Reed, 25, his assistant, were returning from a weeklong visit to Taiwan, Ralph’s son Sheldon Ralph said Tuesday.

Ralph suffered severe burns to his arms and hands and was in stable condition, Sheldon Ralph said.

“We’re very relieved at this point to know he’s alive and OK and will eventually be able to come home,” said Sheldon Ralph, 29, of Calabasas. “We know a lot of families are not as fortunate.”

*

Times staff writers Roberto J. Manzano, Anne-Marie O’Connor and Dalondo Moultrie contributed to this report.