Families Keep a Lonely Vigil for Crash Victims

A dozen people crowd into a Culver City motel room--small, clean and a little bit shabby despite the vase of flowers that sits by the window. The bouquet is an effort at good cheer that seems lost on those inside, the families and friends of three people who died a week ago when their Cessna 172 crashed into Santa Monica Bay.

They have come from New Orleans, Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas and Washington, D.C., to mourn Lionel Russell Jr., the pilot, and passengers Carlos Sheppard and Evelyn Cedeno.

Search efforts are still underway for the bodies of Sheppard and Russell, keeping the families suspended between grief and anger.

“We just want to get the bodies back,” said Brian Williams, a friend of the victims.

As the days pass, the families’ frustration grows.

“Do you see the pain and anguish and grief that these people have?” asked Angel Sheppard, Carlos’ father.

As he spoke, Conchita Russell, the mother of Lionel, lifted herself from her chair and stumbled out the motel door, sobbing.

When a Gulfstream III crashed in Aspen, Colo., last Thursday, the acting chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board personally supervised the initial investigation. The families of the 18 victims were offered counseling and a tour of the crash site.

Now the visiting families are wondering: Do we count any less?

Despite efforts by the Coast Guard, NTSB and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, family members say they feel as though they are being forgotten--not by everyone, but by enough people to sharpen an already unbearable ache.

In a measure of their desperation, they spent one night last weekend walking from Topanga State Beach to the Santa Monica Pier--more than five miles--scanning the sand with a flashlight to hunt for debris. They found none.

Their anger has mostly been directed at the NTSB. The federal agency has a detailed family assistance plan for commercial air crashes, including the Aspen crash. But it doesn’t set forth any requirements for civil aviation crashes.

“However, our investigators are always very involved . . . and if there is a pressing need, our family assistance people are always available,” said NTSB spokeswoman Lauren Peduzzi.

Family members said they repeatedly called NTSB investigator Wayne Pollack and that he did not return their calls. Pollack insisted that he returned “dozens” of calls from relatives and friends of the victims. But he also acknowledged the limits of what the agency is capable of doing for them.

“Understand,” he said, “our primary goal is performing our mission, and that’s accident investigation.”

The Sheriff’s Department--the only agency involved that has earned the families’ praise--is in charge of the operation to recover the wreckage of the plane and the bodies of Russell and Sheppard. Cedeno’s body was found in the water along with wreckage last Thursday, offering the apparent certainty that the plane had crashed.

By the accounts of those who knew them, the lives lost had held extraordinary promise.

Russell, 33, the oldest of seven children, was a big brother who watched over his siblings, embodied a fierce sense of right and wrong and had realized a lifelong goal of becoming a pilot. He worked as a trouble-shooter for Southwest Bell in Dallas.

Sheppard, 27, an accountant in Los Angeles, was Russell’s cousin and lifelong friend. He was recalled as an optimist, an athletic man with a half-moon smile who came close to becoming a professional baseball player. Cedeno, a longtime friend of the Sheppard family from New York, had been visiting her old friend in Los Angeles. She had begun job-hunting here but had planned to return to New York the night of the crash.

“They were all family,” said Maurice Baudy, a close friend of Sheppard’s.

The families said they received a call Monday from the Maple Counseling Center in Beverly Hills, which provides services at the behest of the Sheriff’s Department. While appreciative, they said, it is too little, too late. They complained that no one--from either a public or private agency--had come to visit them at the motel.

On Tuesday afternoon, they were taken on a boat tour of the presumed crash site by the Sheriff’s Department. The rest of their hours have been spent waiting.

Among those grieving is Lionel Russell Jr.’s brother, Damien Russell, who played two seasons with the San Francisco 49ers in the early 1990s. That achievement, he said, paled compared to his big brother’s accomplishment--learning to fly a plane.

“I was more proud when he got his license than by anything I’ve ever done,” he said.

Lionel Russell Sr., a schoolteacher from Baltimore, said the families will continue to press authorities.

“They’ll be getting 50 phone calls a day. They’ll be getting 100 phone calls a day,” he said. “Whatever it takes, we are going to find our children. Their grave is not going to be out there in that bay.”