Before the names of Flight 587 crash victims were read aloud during the somber five-year memorial, Amparo Pena, holding a framed portrait of her sister, Magnolia, had already begun to cry.
And when Robustiano Reyes, 24, read a poem he had written in honor of his uncle, Robert A. Reyes, Pena leaned her head against her daughter’s and squeezed her eyes shut. For Pena, a Ridgewood resident who lost her sister – then 47 – the pain of her loss remains fresh, even five years later.
“Flight 587 was never to land. It went straight through to heaven,” Reyes told the crowd of nearly 1,000 mourners gathered on Sunday, November 12 in Rockaway Park.
At the corner of Beach 116th Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard, they had gathered at the unveiling of the $9.2 million memorial to their loved ones. The memorial is a circular granite structure, designed by Dominican-born sculptor Freddy Rodriguez and inscribed with a line of poetry by Dominican national poet Pedro Mir, “Despues no quiero mas que paz,” or, “Afterwards I want only peace.”
At precisely 9:16 a.m., two ceremonial bells were tolled – signifying the moment of impact of Flight 587, the second-deadliest aviation disaster in United States history.
Later, Pena, Reyes, and other relatives of crash victims walked up to the reddish granite memorial, inscribed with the names of the plane’s 260 passengers and the five people on the ground, who were killed.
Clutching roses and tissues, and wearing pictures of loved ones on pins and T-shirts, the mourners crowded the 7,115-square-foot site of the curved wall for nearly an hour after the memorial had finished. Cutouts, where weeping relatives placed roses, wreaths and photographs, provided glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean.
Some mourners snapped photos of the memorial with cell phones, and others, like Katy Batista of the Bronx, pencil etched the names of loved ones onto pieces of paper. Batista lost her mother, Danas Soriano, and sister, Noemi Batista, when the plane headed for the Dominican Republic crashed minutes after leaving John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport.
“It is a place to which we can always return to read the names of those we lost five years ago, to share our sorrow and our memories, and to contemplate the eternal beauty and grandeur of the skies and the seas,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the mourners. “Your ideas and your memories have been woven into it.”
As Greenwich, Connecticut resident Stanley Molin approached the memorial he searched through the names until he found that of his son, First Officer Sten Phel Molin, who was believed to be flying the American Airlines airbus at the time of the crash.
“I did look for his name, I rubbed the name, I kissed the name,” Molin said.
A retired Eastern Airlines pilot himself, Molin said that following the crash he spent 48 hours at the site – Beach 131st Street and Newport Avenue.
“I recall the devastation of the crash. It was like a WWII bomb went off in Berlin,” Molin remembered. When asked to describe his son, who was 34 when he died, Molin said that Sten’s first love was flying. “He wouldn’t picture himself doing anything else for a livelihood,” Molin said.
“I would have preferred that there was something small built on the [actual] crash site – there is a small plaque there,” Molin said, referring to the actual crash site about 17 blocks way from the new memorial. “To me that’s [the precise crash site] a much more important site.”
Still, Molin said that the memory of his son will live more so in his heart than in any stone structure.
Flight 587 scholarship program
Following the tragedy of Flight 587, the American Airlines Flight 587 Memorial Scholarship program was established.
Recently, State Senator John Sabini, who helped to create the fund, reminded relatives of other Flight 587 victims that they are also eligible for full college scholarships. So far, of the estimated 150 eligible recipients, only 11 students who are related to crash victims have so far come forward to accept the scholarships.
“There is a free education for the survivors of this terrible tragedy just waiting to be used,” Sabini said. “Any benefit we, as a people, can offer the grieving survivors is a good thing. Spouses and children who have lost parents or guardians should not lose the educational opportunities they might have had if this tragedy had not occurred.”
The program, established in 2003, provides scholarships equal to the full CUNY or SUNY undergraduate tuition for up to five years, minus the amount of any other grant received from New York State. The law is retroactive to April 1, 2001 and is applicable to awards made since the 2001-2002 academic school year.
Sabini said that anyone interested for the scholarship should visit the New York State Higher Education Services Corporation website at www.hesc.org, call his office at 718-639-8469, or send an email to sabini@senate.state.ny.us.
