“It was nonstop for the next two weeks, daily, daily, daily. “It was a life-changing experience,” Knabe said. “I looked around and I had friends who lived in that neighborhood and I didn’t know if they were dead or alive.” “I was at the site within 30 or 45 minutes, and it was like going into a war zone. “I was in church and I came out and I thought our new post office was on fire,” he recalled. Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe was mayor of Cerritos at the time. Then she asked if I would pray with her, which I did.” “I sat next to her and all I said, if I remember, is ‘This is a terrible thing,’ and she let out a cry like I never heard before, then she just started sobbing. “She wasn’t talking at all, only groaning and rocking back and forth,” he said. A neighbor, seeing Koepke’s clerical collar, urged him to follow him to where Theresa was sitting in a neighbor’s living room. “You either died or you didn’t.”Īmong those who didn’t was Theresa Estrada, who was returning from a grocery store when she saw the plane crash into her house, killing her husband, Frank, and her children, Javier, 16, and Anjelica, 14. The pastor recalls ambulance and paramedics racing around but ultimately with nothing to do. Koepke was in the heat of the disaster, where residents had been incinerated in their homes and houses were blazing, fully involved. “I grabbed a ladder and went over the fence and suddenly realized where I was.” “I knocked on the door and they let me through,” he said.
The area was already barricaded, so Koepke walked down a cul-de-sac - either Ashworth Place or East Reva Circle - to a home of a member of his congregation. I asked an officer there, ‘Gosh, can I get in?’ And he just said, ‘If you can make it, you can make it,’ and he took off.” “Fire and first responders were just arriving. “Then, I saw the jet nose sticking out of a wall on Carmenita Road. “I saw this huge plume of smoke, and I thought, this is not just a house on fire,” he said. He immediately jumped into his car and drove to the site.
“It was right at the end of the 11 o’clock service, and the usher came forward with a note that a woman had called and said a house was on fire and to please come,” Koepke said. One of the early arrivals at the scene of the wreckage was the Rev. I didn’t see it hit the ground, but when it did there was a huge fireball.” “I heard the thrust reversals, the pilot instinctively trying to slow the plane. “I looked over my fence and I saw the DC-9,” Ray recalls. Nevertheless, Kramer’s plane collided with the jetliner just before noon, clipping off its horizontal tail stabilizer, turning the DC-9 into a rudderless missile. It was a clear day, cloudless, with visibility of 15 miles. They had left Torrance Airport and headed for Big Bear, while an Aeromexico DC-9 flying from Tijuana was bound for Los Angeles International. The 53-year-old Rancho Palos Verdes man was piloting his Piper Archer, accompanied by his wife, Kathleen, and their 27-year-old daughter, Caroline. “I remember thinking, ‘Who’s flying on a Sunday?’ ” Ray, an executive for a Santa Fe Springs-based manufacturing firm that makes parts for airplanes and the space program, heard what he thought was a sonic boom. Then-Planning Commissioner George Ray, who today is the mayor of Cerritos, was doing some work at home on his dining room table. Some residents were in church, some were shopping for groceries for backyard barbecues. If anyone had any plans for the day, they weren’t ambitious. That’s how many people described the day up until 11:56 a.m.: quiet. Thirty years ago today was a Sunday, the heart of the Labor Day weekend, and just as two planes were about to collide a mile and a half above the young city of Cerritos, things in the suburban town were quiet, as you’d expect.
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