Crash Devastates N.Y. Dominicans

The customer who told Nancy Jimenez about the crash Monday got the number wrong, saying it was Flight 300, which meant nothing to her. But then someone else rushed in off the street and said, “It was Flight 587!” And Jimenez knew exactly what that meant.

“Those are our people.”

Jimenez was talking about her Washington Heights community on Manhattan’s northern tip, home to about 500,000 Dominican immigrants. Many of them were on the American Airlines flight en route to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, that crashed Monday on takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Jimenez thought of Ivelisse Taveras, a 42-year-old stylist from a hair salon a few blocks down Broadway, a mother of two with long dark hair. Taveras talked for an hour when she came into Jimenez’s Don Quixote travel agency on West 181st Street to pick up her ticket. She explained how she was eager to see her husband in the Dominican Republic, but that her life was “a little hectic” and she needed to change her reservation from Nov. 5 to Monday.

Taveras was still taking American Airlines Flight 587, of course--that was the favorite flight of people in Washington Heights. It was the first one to the Dominican Republic each morning and took only 3 1/2 hours.

Then the phone rang at the travel agency and it was Taveras’ mother, asking, “Was that the flight?” She was crying, but hoped somehow she was mistaken.

Jimenez told her, “I’m sorry.” She too was crying.

Jimenez thought of a woman of 70 she knew by the nickname “Pinchin,” who used to baby-sit her daughter. That woman also bought a ticket for that flight, planning to spend 21 days in the Dominican Republic “to visit family and do some errands.”

Then Jimenez realized that the husband of a friend was on board as well, going back “just to spend some time” because he was out of a job now, with the economy soured.

“We’re going to do a little more mourning,” the travel agent concluded, the “more” being a reference to the ongoing funerals for victims of the World Trade Center attacks. The president of the Dominican Republic, Hipolito Mejia, came to the neighborhood two weeks ago for a memorial service at the Saint Catherine of Genoa Catholic Church, honoring the 41 Dominican victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

At the Alianza Dominicana social service agency on Amsterdam Avenue at 179th Street, the executive director, Moises Perez, also was familiar with Flight 587. “I’ve taken it a million times myself,” he said.

He said, “This, of course, will be much bigger for Washington Heights [than Sept. 11]. There’ll be very few people disconnected from this tragedy.”

By Monday afternoon, the agency had discovered that eight of its staff members had relatives or friends on the flight. Perez said he’d heard that the daughter of a famous Dominican musician, and a leading radio personality, had been passengers. But mostly it was a flight for the “common people,” he said.

So it was the mother of Ivelisse Taveras, the hair stylist, who showed up looking for help, with her daughter’s two young children in tow. But she saw Lillian Martinez, the agency’s program director, and began hugging the woman, and sobbing.

“She said I reminded her of her daughter,” Martinez explained after the grieving mother was led off. “She said I had long hair just like her daughter. She wouldn’t let go.”

The sad stories poured in:

Another staffer, Iris Bursos Berrios, told of consoling a man who had driven his wife and two children, ages 4 and 6, to the airport. The wife was six months pregnant with their third child and wanted to see her own mother in the Dominican Republic, who was “very sick.”

Cid Wilson, the son of a local doctor, stopped by to see how he could help. Wilson, 31, a financial researcher who helped organize a “Dominicans on Wall Street” organization, said he had a good friend on the flight--Felix Sanchez. Sanchez, 29, a financial consultant who handled investments for some of the Dominican baseball players and who had narrowly escaped the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

“We had drinks two weeks ago and you could tell he was really high on life,” Wilson said. “He realized what was important to him.”

Washington Heights has more often gained notice for what has gone wrong: Its notorious street drug markets and soaring murder rate during the crack epidemic. Its 1992 riots, days before the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden, after the police shooting of a 23-year-old man.

On Monday, a top official from the local police station came by Perez’s agency to offer “any assistance you need. You have our number,” said Deputy Inspector John McNamara. “Reach out any time.’

The president of the local school board came by too, to talk about how they might help children who recently were drawing pictures of the World Trade Center as therapy.

“It will not be easy,” Perez said. “This community is going to need the rest of the city.”