by Steve Beaven
By now, chaos and confusion had replaced the ghostly solitude that Stephen Troyer found when he arrived at the ravine. The crash site had grown crowded with so many rescue workers wearing identical heavy black raincoats that it was difficult to tell who was giving orders and who was taking them. The mayor and the police chief joined the sheriff. Truck drivers showed up to volunteer their services and spectators showed up to watch.
“The best way for you to help is to leave,” one rescue worker told the crowd. “Don’t make me stand here and keep asking you to leave. We have a lot of work to do.”
Spectators walked solemnly from the crash site, warning other sightseers to keep their distance.
“Don’t go in,” one said. “It’s awful.”
At the University of Evansville, President Wallace Graves sat in the dark near the back of Wheeler Concert Hall, enjoying a string quartet performance by the music faculty with his wife and mother-in-law. Around 8:00 p.m., shortly after the concert began, UE vice president Thornton Patberg appeared at Graves’s side. They spoke briefly before hurrying into the hallway. Details were vague, Patberg said gravely, but there were reports of a plane crash at the airport. It might be the basketball team. The two men rushed to Patberg’s house, about two blocks away, where they were joined by Arad McCutchan and the athletic director, Jim Byers. At first, they thought the reports were wrong. After all, the team had been scheduled to fly out at 4:00 p.m. But the television and radio stations had begun reporting the details from the crash site, leaving Graves and his colleagues to face the grim reality that the UE basketball team, a civic cornerstone, was gone.
McCutchan volunteered to go to Deaconess Hospital to check on the lone survivor. Patberg and Byers would head to the community center downtown, where a makeshift morgue had been opened. Graves wanted to call the families of the passengers, to let them know what had happened and to provide the few details he could. But the police asked the university to refrain from confirming any deaths, even to the families of the victims, until each of the bodies was officially identified by the coroner. It was standard operating procedure for police and fire departments. The potential for a traumatic mistake, notifying the family of someone not on the plane, was too great a risk. Graves reluctantly agreed to hold off and headed for police headquarters, next to the community center. Once he arrived, he was led to an office, given a cup of coffee, and asked to wait. He spent an agonizing interval there, alone, eager to go to the community center, uncertain why the police wanted him to stay, and unwilling to leave of his own volition. There was no disaster plan to prepare Graves for a tragedy like this, nothing to guide him. So he waited until the police told him he was needed at the morgue, where he would endure the most excruciating moments of the evening.
Valery Kingston, Kevin’s fifteen-year-old sister, heard the news on the pep squad bus after an Eldorado High School basketball game in Norris City. Valery, a junior varsity cheerleader, didn’t understand at first. She thought the UE team had been in a bus crash. But slowly, on the fifteen-minute ride home to Eldorado, she realized it was more serious than that. The girls in front of her whispered to each other. The rest of the bus was silent. When it arrived in front of the high school, Valery stopped at the door, where she found her father waiting for her.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
Don Kingston nodded his head, enveloped his only child in his arms, and walked her to the car. Wanda, Valery’s mother, sat weeping in the passenger seat. The Kingstons headed to Wanda’s parents’ house, a few blocks from the high school, because Wanda didn’t want them to hear the news on TV. Then Don drove Wanda and Valery home to their house on Old Broughton Road. They walked in the back door to find the kitchen already filled with friends making coffee and getting the house ready for mourners. Lou Beck, the town pharmacist, hugged Valery. So did the pastor’s wife from First Baptist Church. Relatives and neighbors streamed in and out. Valery’s friends joined her on the porch to get away from the commotion. No one—not the university or the coroner—had contacted the Kingstons to confirm details of the crash, who had died, and who had survived. But for Don, Wanda, and Valery, the mourning had already begun. TV and radio stations were reporting that there was only one survivor, leaving them certain that Kevin was dead. When Valery came inside for the ten o’clock news, old footage of Kevin appeared on the television and Don Kingston broke down in tears.
But across town, at Kay Barrow’s house, the mood was different. Kay and John wanted to believe that the lone survivor was Mike. They had been listening to the Eldorado game on the radio when the news broke. Soon, family and friends crowded into their house on Organ Street. Kay’s parents came up from Shawneetown. Bob Brown, Mike’s high school coach, arrived after visiting the Kingstons. Mike’s friends came over. The TV was on. Guests paced the floor, smoking cigarettes, waiting for good news. Kay and John were on the phone, trying to reach someone who would tell them that Mike was alive.
In his dorm room at Purdue, Craig Bohnert watched the end of the Purdue-Louisville basketball game with friends and changed the channel to Soap. Craig was a sophomore, thinking about a career as a veterinarian. But organic chemistry gave him fits and he wondered about returning to Evansville and earning a scholarship as a student manager, just like his brother Jeff.
The guys who lived on Craig’s dorm floor knew that he and his roommate were from Evansville. So, about fifteen minutes after the Purdue game ended, one of their neighbors stuck his head into the room.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you know anyone on the Evansville basketball team?”
Rescue workers unbuckled bodies from airplane seats, placed them in rubber bags, and carried them through knee-deep water and down the muddy embankment to a train that would transport them to the makeshift morgue. Federal investigators on their way to Evansville asked the workers to cover the bodies and leave them at the site until they arrived the next day. But the sheriff and police chief decided, in deference to the families, that they couldn’t abandon the dead amid the wreckage in a desolate field on a wet night.
When the train pulled up behind the morgue, hundreds of people stood in the rain along the railroad tracks in a silent vigil. Dozens more waited in the lobby. They could see into the gym, with basketball hoops at each end, where the bodies were cleaned, examined, and photographed. Fingerprints were taken, and each body was covered with a white sheet and placed on the floor. The heat had been turned off. From outside, as columnist Rod Spaw later described it, the gym looked as if it had been covered in snowdrifts, with white-coated medical examiners moving among white-covered tables that held white-covered bodies. As families arrived, they were led in one by one to identify the bodies. A medical examiner showed them wallets and driver’s licenses that had been found at the site. They didn’t have to view the bodies if they didn’t want to, he said. Some just wanted to see an arm or a leg. One boy’s mother entered the gym supported by men on each side. They led her to a table, she covered her face with a hand, her knees buckled, and they helped her away.
“Oh God no,” another woman cried. “Not him. Not him.”
UE assistant coach Ernie Simpson, who had been scouting a high school game in Kentucky, joined athletic director Jim Byers and a group of priests and ministers to console the relatives. Simpson gently took the arm of Freida Taylor, Bryan’s mom, and led her in to identify her son’s body. When they pulled back the sheet to reveal his face, Freida noticed that his hair was mussed, as if he had just stepped off the court after practice. His nose was broken, too. Then she saw blood spattered on the sheet, and the medical examiners wouldn’t let her see the rest of Bryan’s body.
Arad McCutchan moved through the hallways, from one family to another, still dressed in the red V-neck sweater and white shirt he’d worn to class that night, tie knotted at his neck but slightly askew. He consoled the parents of boys he’d recruited, boys who’d sat at his kitchen table, books piled high, as he tutored them in algebra. His famous reserve served him well, a helpful
counterpoint to the grief that engulfed the gym.
“At times like this,” he said, “you must turn around and face things. But I’ve never had to face anything like this.”
At midnight, Wallace Graves sat in a folding chair with a bare white cinder-block wall as a backdrop and microphones arrayed on a table in front of him. He faced a crowd of local reporters, looking pale and drawn, as if the blood had been drained from his face.
“This is a tragedy that defies description,” he said. “We’re all quite numb at this point. But we know that the victims of this crash were all fine people, a great bunch of student basketball players and coaches and friends. The university will suffer their loss for the rest of its life.”
Craig Bohnert ran to a phone in the hallway of his dorm floor and called home. Don Bohnert had just gotten home from a meeting and told Craig he hadn’t heard anything about a crash. But Don promised he’d make some calls and get back to him.
After they hung up, Craig threw clothes into a bag. A guy who lived down the hall offered to drive him to Evansville, more than four hours south of West Lafayette. But after ninety minutes on the road, a state trooper pulled them over, walked to the driver’s side, and told them he was looking for Craig Bohnert. Craig identified himself and asked the trooper whether he had news about the crash. The trooper told them he didn’t know anything about a crash, but was ordered to direct Craig back to West Lafayette. Don Bohnert had called state police because he worried about Craig traveling to Evansville in bad weather.
Once he returned to his dorm, Craig’s mom called. As soon as he picked up the phone, she said, “He’s gone.”
Stephen Troyer and John Schymik helped load the last survivor into the ambulance and then climbed in for the ride to Deaconess Hospital. They suctioned his throat, inserted a tube to aid his breathing, and put an oxygen mask on his face. As the ambulance sped downtown in light traffic, a paramedic placed splints on the young man’s broken ankles and wrists. A nurse and several technicians met the ambulance in the parking lot with a stretcher. Inside the hospital, an IV was inserted and a blood transfusion was administered. The hospital staff had prepared for mass casualties, filling a hallway with a long line of cots on wheels. Five additional doctors were called in to help and about thirty workers from the day shift returned from a nearby holiday party. But with only one survivor, there was little for them to do.
Around midnight, the phone rang in the emergency room’s registration office. It was Kay Barrow, calling from Eldorado. She’d been on the phone for three hours, trying to confirm that her son was still alive. A hospital spokesman came on the line and broke the news: Mike Duff, Eldorado’s favorite son, the sweet-faced boy with so much potential, was dead.
Art and Carolyn Smith, Greg’s parents, drove ninety minutes from West Frankfort to Evansville after the news director at Art’s radio station stopped by their house that night to ask whether they knew anything about the crash. Greg had played sparingly that season and had been left at home for the DePaul game to make room on the team plane for a booster. But the mere fact that he had made the team brought him such great joy. Greg joked after the loss at Indiana State that Larry Bird went to the bench only after Greg entered the game because Bird, obviously, was afraid of him.
After talking to his news director, Art immediately called Greg’s room, hopeful that for some reason he had been left behind again. Maybe that booster had wanted to see the Middle Tennessee State game, too. But there was no answer. Then they saw a news alert on TV.
“Greg’s dead,” cried Doug, his little brother.
Carolyn wouldn’t have it. She looked him straight in the eye. “Doug,” she said firmly, “don’t say that.”
Art called the Evansville Police Department to confirm that the team had been on the plane that crashed, and piled into the car with Carolyn and the principal and basketball coach from West Frankfort High School. They headed straight for the community center, but still held out hope after hearing on the radio that there were survivors. Amid the chaos at the morgue, someone from the university told them that Greg was alive and had been taken to Deaconess.
“If he’s alive now,” Art told Carolyn, “he’s going to make it.”
They got to the hospital at 12:30 a.m., four hours after Greg had arrived, and rushed inside.
It was five minutes too late. Art was ushered alone into the intensive care unit to identify his son. The doctors told him he could stay with Greg as long as he’d like, and Art didn’t want to leave. Art stared at Greg’s face, noting the scratches and his swollen lips, the bandage on his head. Finally, he left Greg’s side and returned to his wife.
“Carolyn,” Art said, “that is Greg. And he is dead.”
Then Art and Carolyn Smith stepped away and walked to the hospital chapel, where they sat together, pleading in silence for the wisdom to understand the most horrific day of their lives.
EIGHT
A Feeling of Death
THE FOG LIFTED AT dawn, revealing a crash site that looked like a moonscape: flat, gray, otherworldly, cratered, and nearly impossible to reach. Debris was strewn around the wreckage and in a trail leading down to the ravine: A UE letter jacket. Broken seats and belts. First aid kits and luggage. The purple banner with call letters WUEV that Marv Bates draped over his broadcast table was submerged in a muddy puddle. Bags filled with clothes, shoes, and equipment lined the railroad tracks. Great chunks of the jet were scattered across the field, a wing here, the fuselage there. The nose of the plane was buried so deep in the soft turf that it had to be pulled from the muck with earth-moving equipment. The stench of charred human flesh hung in the air. Investigators sifted through the remains of the jet, from big sections that remained intact, like the tail, to the miniscule components of the wings. Once the last remnants of the fires had burned out and the threat of explosion subsided, the investigators climbed gingerly into what was left of the blackened cockpit, where they found the last two bodies: pilot Ty Van Pham and James Stewart, the owner of National Jet Service. Van Pham, who had flown in the South Vietnamese military before immigrating to the US, was burned beyond recognition. The bodies were dragged from the wreckage, placed in black rubber bags, and transported to mortuaries, first by railcar and then by hearse.
Classes had been canceled at the University of Evansville. The student union was empty. Signs at Carson Center, where Bobby Watson had ended practice in disgust less than forty-eight hours earlier, advised that wrestling practice was postponed, the gym was closed, and the building was locked. The previous night, hundreds of students had filled Neu Chapel, the university’s neo-Gothic cathedral, consoling each other with hugs and praying silently at the altar. Some stayed up till the first slivers of muted daylight appeared, watching the news and holding vigils in dorms and fraternity houses. At 6:00 a.m., a group of bleary-eyed boys sat dumbstruck in the lounge at Moore Hall, where they’d spent the whole night in numb confusion.
“You just can’t take something like that to bed,” one said.
By 11:00 a.m., students, faculty, and townspeople began lining up on the yellowed grass outside the slate-and-limestone chapel for a memorial service that wouldn’t start until noon. More than a thousand people, twice the chapel’s capacity, came to mourn. They passed through the vaulted entrance and filed into pews, some carrying wreaths of flowers. They sat under the high-arching wooden ceiling, filling every row. When the pews were full, they stood in the aisles, and when the aisles were full, they squeezed into the lobby or waited outside on the steps. Inside, a choir dressed in purple robes stood high up in the loft at the back of the chapel, accompanied by the mournful music of a pipe organ. Ministers of all faiths took turns at the pulpit, leading the stunned and sobbing congregation in prayer. Wallace Graves looked as if he hadn’t slept. Arad McCutchan’s face was a portrait of grief. Thornton Patberg, who had stayed on campus long after midnight to call the families of the dead, encouraged listeners to remember all that the team had done for the university.
“These men,” Patberg said, “were instilled with pride and a sense of Christian worth that permeated the entire institution.”
Classes resumed two days later. But the funereal mood had emptied the campus, and the lecture halls were less than half full. The energy and anxiety that typically marked final exams were absent. Professors set aside lesson plans and mundane exam prep to address the existential questions. In a business class that had included three of the players, the instructor showed a film about the fear of the unknown. Faculty called for the cancellation of finals. But it didn’t matter. Many students had already left, skipping classes to go home to their families. An economics professor compared the campus to a morgue.
“There’s a feeling of death here,” one student said. “I think we should get away as quickly as possible and try to begin again after the holidays.”
The hearse carrying Mike Duff’s body slowly made its way through the narrow streets of Eldorado on a bright Friday afternoon, passing shuttered businesses and flags flying at half-staff, past the town drugstore, not far from the outdoor court where he’d played in the summer. Finally, it pulled up to the gymnasium where the most memorable moments of his brief life had unfolded. This is where he dropped thirty-seven on Metropolis High School, breaking Eldorado’s season scoring record the night Joe B. Hall came to town. This is where he’d signed autographs for the elementary school kids, where everyone in the city came to see his wondrous skills and speculate on where they might take him someday. Friends carried his casket inside and placed it along the sideline, near midcourt. It was 1:00 p.m., an hour before the funeral, and already nearly three thousand people filled the stands, a great cross section of family and friends, coaches and players from other schools, and mourners who only knew Mike and Kevin from the newspapers. Kevin’s casket arrived a half hour later, carried by former Eldorado High School teammates. The Duff and Kingston families sat in folding chairs on the court, near the caskets, each of which was decorated with vases of flowers, wreaths of chrysanthemums, and a basketball. Players from the current Eldorado team, dressed in purple and gold jackets, sat behind the families. At midcourt, Ernie Simpson sat stone-faced next to Bob Brown, who wept throughout the service. Children who once sat on the gym floor to watch Kevin and Mike play, took seats in the stands, fidgeting in their church clothes, sad and confused.
