Many Still Grieve on Anniversary of Crash

On that bright, terrible day a year ago, grief washed over everyone on the beach here, and on the nearby docks at Channel Islands Harbor, and on the decks of the boats that went out for survivors but came back with debris.

It surged like a black tide over the squid fishermen whose powerful lights scanned the waves at night, over the Coast Guard crews who searched in vain, over the volunteers who tried to soothe the anguished families gazing numbly at the picture-perfect sea.

Now the tide has receded. The grieving for the 83 passengers and five crew members on Alaska Airlines Flight 261 has grown quieter. A man picks up the phone and suddenly remembers that he can’t reach his old friend. Another closes his eyes and sees his mother, as if on a video screen, reminding him to bring his wife flowers. Students at an elementary school plant a garden for the four classmates who went on vacation and didn’t come back.

Those who helped at sea look toward Anacapa Island and recall the acrid smell of jet fuel on the towering waves, the water awash with tray tables, suitcases, torn seat cushions, shoes still tied, bits and pieces of humanity. The hundreds who paced the shoreline and lined the pier remember the piles of flowers and teddy bears, the candles, the tears--silent offerings to people they never would meet.

This week, friends and family members of those on Flight 261 will gather on the Ventura County coast to mark the first anniversary of their loss. They’ll be ferried out to the crash site eight miles from Port Hueneme. They’ll attend private services and the dedication of a memorial stone at Naval Base Ventura County. They’ll greet the sailors and firefighters and Red Cross volunteers who aided them, and they’ll display mementos of their loved ones for the public at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center.

At Alaska Airlines’ Seattle headquarters and at its stations elsewhere, the company will hold its own observances. On Wednesday, each employee will wear a white rose. At 4:21 p.m, there will be a moment of silence.

Exactly one year before, 8-year-old Alicia Alonzo tugged at her father’s shirt as the two fished off the Port Hueneme pier.

“Look, daddy, look,” she said. “There’s a plane falling.”

On Anacapa, a National Park Service maintenance man named Drew Gotshall--one of the island’s two residents--saw the same thing. In the water, fisherman Tony Alfieri heard a thunderous noise; less than a mile off, a huge plume of spray shot into the air.

In the last year, the crash has reverberated in countless ways.

Mary and Scott Jarvis still marvel at the gold ring that wound up on their fishing boat that night. Their nephew, Kevin Marquiss, hauled in his nets off Santa Rosa Island before racing to the crash site. Amid the sodden debris he hauled aboard, a ring glittered--a Masonic ring with three tiny red stones. The Jarvises traced it to Bob Williams, who they saw described in accounts of the crash as an active Mason.

Williams, of Poulsbo, Wash., died that night, along with his wife, Patty.

Marquiss returned the ring to the couple’s daughter in Washington, and Mary Jarvis has chatted with her on the phone half a dozen times and exchanged a number of e-mails. This week, the families will get together, both on shore and on the Jarvises’ boat.

“It kind of forever connects you to somebody, in a strange way,” Mary Jarvis said. “If you look at all the events, you can’t think it was coincidental--that there was something more at work, the way the ring was found and how we found them.”

The tragedy wove together mourning family members and the local people who rushed to their aid.

Some of the families keep in touch with Dan Green, a Port Hueneme pastor who will be on hand for counseling during this week’s observances.

Last year, he was at the docks to comfort the rescue workers stricken by a baby bottle bobbing in the waves, the exhausted young Seabees moved to tears by the absence of survivors. On the beach, a woman grieving for her brother asked, “Why me?” Without speaking, Green hugged her and the two wept.

Many of the families are angry, Green said.

They pointedly refer to the “crash” --not the “accident.” At their insistence, airline representatives were not invited to this week’s tribute, Green said.

“Their question now isn’t, ‘How could God do this?’ ” he said. “It’s, ‘How could Alaska Airlines do this?” ’

Last year, the company gave each victim’s family $135,000. A lawsuit that incorporates claims of negligence by 55 families has yet to be heard.

Ultimately, though, they bear the vacancy in their lives alone.

Visions of his mother’s final moments have overcome Larry Nelson, 35, of Lynwood, Wash.

“One time I was driving and I was crying so hard I had to pull over,” he said. “My mom hated flying. She must have been freaking out when that plane went inverted.”

Nelson and his mother, Charlene Sipe, were close. They went digging together for clams and oysters. They attended church and did crossword puzzles, played cards and donated the winnings to a fund for Nelson’s children.

Now she visits in his dreams.

“She’ll be telling me about my wife,” he laughed, his voice cracking as he imitated her: “You should buy her flowers. You should take her out to dinner.”

Steve Edmonds, a Redondo Beach ice-cream manufacturer, lost longtime friend Robert Hovey. Twenty-five years ago, the two met on a ski trip, hit it off, and were pals ever since. Edmonds even hired Hovey, who lived in Berkeley, to service restaurants and hotels in the Bay Area.

“He did a great job for me,” Edmonds said, “but he was also my ski buddy. In the last year, I’ve thought maybe I’ll call Bob to see if he wants to go to Aspen or somewhere--and then, I realized . . . “

Instead of their customary ski trip, the men had a terrific time on a week’s getaway in Puerto Vallarta last January. At the end, they took different flights home.

“You just don’t realize,” Edmonds said, “how much you do with a friend.”

In Seattle last week, children and teachers at John Hay Elementary School broke ground on a garden, recalling four classmates who died on Flight 261. Two families--the Pearsons and the Clemetsons--had gone to Mexico together. Both families--the four students, two sets of parents, and two babies--were killed.

“Our love is finding its expression in the garden,” Principal Joanne Testa-Cross said. “It’s been an incredibly life-giving project.”

Pathways wind through a whimsical arch, into a plaza with rainbow swirls of color, and beside a memorial stone with the children’s names. Donations of more than $45,000 for the project poured in from parents, neighborhood businesses and the Seattle Supersonics basketball team.

“I’m very firm in feeling we need to go through this as a community,” the principal said.

Eleven hundred miles to the south, dental hygienist Kimber Gunter felt much the same. From her Oxnard apartment a mile from the docks, Gunter heard the helicopters that night and watched the TV news in shock. Within days, she started a fund for a crash memorial in Port Hueneme--an effort that has since been taken up by a committee of families.

“It was something I needed to do,” she said. “It was God pressing on my heart.”

Many people shared the need to acknowledge the crash by doing something bigger than turning on the news.

At Casa Pacifica, the county’s shelter for abused and neglected children, young residents made sandwiches for the search workers and condolence cards for the victims’ families. Along the coast, strangers chatted somberly, as if at a funeral. In the midday sky, a skywriter etched a cross and a heart.

At her beauty supply shop in Port Hueneme, Julie Moss looks back with both sorrow and pride.

“I was so touched by the spirit of kinship, by the sadness for the families,” she said. “No matter what bad news you read about people not caring for each other, it isn’t dead; it’s inside of us, waiting to be called out.”

The crash profoundly affected some professionals who have pitched in at more than one disaster.

In the last year, a Coast Guard stress-management team evaluated more than 600 sailors who were involved in the recovery effort.

The men and women who sought help--many of them in their 20s--spoke of deep frustration at being unable to find any survivors.

The crash put unfamiliar pressure even on seasoned disaster officials.

“It was the most traumatic, challenging, demanding incident I’ve ever worked in my entire career,” said Laura Hernandez, manager of the Ventura County Emergency Operations Center.

In the last year, Hernandez has given dozens of talks to her counterparts across the state, outlining the organizational immensity of a disaster to which more than 70 agencies responded.

“It’s been hard, because every time we do a presentation, we have to relive the incident, and it ends up taking its toll,” she said.

Death certificates have been issued for all 88 victims, although three were never identified and are considered “lost at sea,” said Ventura County Medical Examiner Ronald O’Halloran.

O’Halloran, a medical examiner for 21 years, said the prolonged search for definitive identifications got to him, especially when so many answers were demanded so urgently of experts toiling over such pitifully fragmented remains.

“It just went on and on,” he said, “month after month.”

For many, the feelings that came with the crash linger, a lesson in vulnerability.

Steve “Smitty” Smith of Oxnard has loved being around the ocean for most of his 53 years, but last year for three months he was suddenly disinterested in his weekend passion of surfing.

“The water had a cold, lonely feel,” he said.

Last year, 12-year-old Rebekah Steed and dozens of her Hueneme Christian School classmates offered a tribute to the victims and the recovery crews at a makeshift beach memorial.

This year, Debbie Steed, Rebekah’s mother, thinks about her husband, Kelly, and his new job, which comes with lots of air travel.

“We say a little prayer each time that he leaves,” she said.

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Times staff writers Margaret Talev, Matt Surman and correspondent Jenifer Ragland contributed to this story.