Cerritos Moves On, but Legacy of Tragedy Lingers

The last time Jeffrey McIllwain saw his mother, she was standing on the porch in a housedress, saying that she loved him.

For goodness sake, he thought with the embarrassment of a 16-year-old, I’m only going to church.

At 11:52 a.m. on Aug. 31, 1986, while McIllwain was still at Sunday school, an Aeromexico DC-9 on approach to Los Angeles International Airport from Mexico collided with a small plane and slammed into the boy’s neighborhood in Cerritos. His mother, Linda, 14 others in their houses, and 67 people aboard the two planes were killed that sunny Sunday.

It was an improbable, unthinkable tragedy: Planes plunging from blue skies into a quiet, suburban neighborhood, slaughtering people in their homes, showering body parts everywhere. Never had so many been killed on the ground as the result of an airline crash in the United States.

Today, there is no hint of the disaster. Tidy beige stucco homes with neatly shorn lawns fill the streets where 10 houses were destroyed and six severely damaged. There are no commemorative plaques. Some of those new to the area, just east of Carmenita Avenue, know nothing of its grim history. Only one family that lost a relative remains in the neighborhood: the McIllwains, who rebuilt their home.

The cause of the crash--an inadequate air traffic control system and poor judgment by the small plane’s pilot--was settled long ago. The Federal Aviation Administration has tightened air space restrictions around LAX and other major airports. One of the final lawsuits stemming from the crash was settled last fall when a federal judge awarded $2.9 million to the family of the jetliner’s pilot.

What remains unsettled, and in many cases deeply hidden, are the emotional consequences.

“I can still hear the plane screaming--that is a sound that I’ll never forget,” said Sue Nelson, who moved to Michigan five years after the crash. She was in her house eating Cheese Whiz nachos and her 7-year-old son, Robbie, was outside with his dog Peach when the Aeromexico plane spiraled to the ground. “That sound and the smell of jet fuel burning, and how everything got black and dark.”

After the Cerritos City Council discussed commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the crash, two dozen residents signed a petition asking that no ceremony take place. “None of us need to have attention drawn to this area again,” they wrote. Numerous residents declined to be interviewed.

In honor of residents’ wishes, the council will hold a moment of silence at its meeting Thursday.

Some longtime residents, such as Wes and Carmeen Neally, did not come back to Cerritos after the crash because they wanted to erase the terrifying memory of scrambling through the flame-enshrouded neighborhood.

“After talking to counselors and to each other, we decided it was not a good idea to move back into the area that we were fighting for our lives to get out of,” said Wes Neally, who was badly burned by the time he, his wife, their then 8-year-old daughter Reanna and her friend Diane escaped.

Wes Neally had been standing in his swim trunks next to the garage refrigerator when the plane crashed. The airplane’s wing sliced off the top of his two-story house, the fuselage smacked into the yard, and the house burst into flames. Neally ran inside, screaming for his family, not realizing that they were in the backyard.

By the time Neally found Carmeen and the two young girls, their street had formed a wall of fire. Using a table, they climbed over their backyard brick wall, hopscotching flames, joining other neighbors in a frantic escape.

The couple’s other daughter, Rochelle, then 15, worried when her mother didn’t pick her up from her aunt’s house as she had promised. After 90 minutes, her aunt drove her to Cerritos. The house was leveled; all that remained was a blackened, smoldering lot. Seat belts dangled from charred tree branches.

Today, Neally, a Los Angeles County weights and measures inspector, lives with his family in Yorba Linda, 15 miles east of the home where they lived 15 years.

The nightmare that once regularly haunted Wes Neally--flying aboard a plane that crashes--now strikes only a couple of times a year. Yet “probably a day doesn’t go by when you don’t think about it. Something relates to it, a large rumble, or just seeing a plane in the sky. Anything reminds you of it happening again.”

Among his family, he alone returns to the old neighborhood, only when necessary because of his job.

The disaster strengthened the bonds in an already close family. Rochelle--25, married, and living in Costa Mesa--talks to her parents every day. Usually, she has coffee with them every Friday morning.

“You want to enjoy every day because there’s no guarantee that tomorrow will come,” Neally said.

Jeffrey McIllwain understands.

The night before the crash, McIllwain had come home at 1 a.m. As usual, he went into his parents’ bedroom to let them know he was home, and kissed his mother good-night.

It was so late he figured he would skip church for the first time in two years and sleep in. But after his alarm rang at 9:30 a.m., he changed his mind, jumped into khaki jeans and a cream-colored button-down shirt and headed for church. His mother, Linda, 37, told him to take her baby blue Oldsmobile instead of his blue Volkswagen beetle, which was low on gas.

Come back by 12:15 p.m., Linda McIllwain told him. She needed her car to go to Mass in Buena Park. Have a nice time, she said as she came out to the porch in herhousedress. She was still waving as he pulled out of the driveway, Jeffrey remembers.

“I’m so thankful that was my final memory,” said McIllwain, now 26 and a teacher. “It’s like a mercy from God.”

At Sunday school, one of the students said a plane had crashed in Cerritos. Yeah, right, the others said. Jeffrey and a friend hopped in their cars and drove toward home. The smoke-encased neighborhood was cordoned off.

Jeffrey left the car and walked in. From the billowing plumes of smoke, he instantly knew his house had been hit.

In his mind, he kept going over a line from the Bible: “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.” Silently, he asked God to fulfill that pledge: “If there’s any way you can have my parents live through this, please do. Please do.”

At his house, all that remained was the garage. The two mopeds inside had melted. Jeffrey asked neighbors if his mother or father were alive. No one knew.

At the GTE building, an impromptu disaster headquarters, he saw his father, Dennis, who had left the house that morning at the last minute for a quick visit with Jeffrey’s aunt in Pomona.

Dennis McIllwain could not believe his wife was dead. Perhaps she had miraculously escaped. At the disaster headquarters, he pitched an emotional appeal to a TV anchorman that was captured live:

“Linda, if you are out there, call me,” he said to the camera. A nearby phone rang and Dennis McIllwain lunged to grab it, his face radiant with hope. It was a cousin. Dennis McIllwain was crushed with disappointment.

There was virtually nothing left of the family home. But Jeffrey McIllwain kept mementos, a charred piece of wood, the plastic driving glasses and a hairbrush that his mother stored in her car. A neighbor brought over something that had blown into his yard. It was a check written to the hospital on the day that Jeffrey was born.

Jeffrey McIllwain found consolation in the kindness of friends and neighbors, the people who brought home-cooked meals or told him stories: how his mother had comforted kids whose parents were undergoing divorce, how she had offered everyone rides from school to home, even boys she knew had joined a gang.

Almost a year after the Cerritos crash, a Northwest Airlines plane plunged to the ground as it took off from the Detroit airport. All but one of the flight’s 157 passengers were killed. The sole survivor was a 4-year-old girl whose mother had shielded her from the crash.

Jeffrey McIllwain wrote five letters to the little girl in the hospital. He tried to tell her what had helped him: Always remember your parents’ love for you and rely on the love of your family. Maybe the girl was too young to understand what he wrote, but perhaps one day she would read those letters and they would help.

Jeffrey began to realize he had to make a choice. “I had 16 years with one of the best mothers anybody could ever have had--granted I wanted 80 more years with her,” he says, his dark eyes moist. “But I had a choice. . . . If I sat and let this destroy my life, I’d be dishonoring my mother.”

He found comfort in carrying out his mother’s dream. Linda McIllwain, who had not attended college, always wanted her children to have a solid education. She loved buying books for Jeffrey. She had gotten an accounting job so she could help pay for his college.

McIllwain--a high school senior at the time of the Aeromexico crash--attended USC, where he graduated with honors and went on to earn two graduate degrees at other universities. This fall, he will start teaching at Sonoma State University as an assistant professor of criminal justice.

With each educational laurel, he thinks of how pleased his mother would be.

It’s not just that McIllwain misses his mother during the milestone events, like graduation. It’s the little stuff, too.

“It’s on a daily basis--I can’t pick up the phone and talk to her,” he said. “It’s the voice that’s not there; the laughter that’s not there. How do you not feel that day in, day out?”

As the years go by, McIllwain realizes the little ways in which the crash has changed his life. At first, he was overly protective of family members and friends, trying to make sure that everyone was safe. He stored negatives of photos in a fireproof safe. And every tragedy, such as the recent Olympics bombing and the explosion of a TWA jet over New York, brings a painful jolt of empathy with the victims.

One day, McIllwain hopes to marry and raise a family of his own. That, too, gives him a pang.

“For the rest of my life,” he says, “I’ll be wishing my children had their grandmother to go to--that’s the legacy of this tragedy.”