- ROCKAWAY BEACH, NY -"I
will never believe it was an accident. They'll never convince me of
that."
-
- Eugene Sanfilippo kept looking past the microphones and
notebooks, down 131st Street toward Jamaica Bay and a vision that the rest
of us could not see.
-
- It was past three in the afternoon, the sky above this
sliver of Queens was clear, but all this lanky, 45-year-old bus mechanic
could see was a huge orange ball of flame; he could still feel the
unbearable
heat; he could hear people screaming; he could taste the acrid black
smoke.
-
- And he was still afraid.
-
- "When I heard the explosion, I thought we were under
attack," Sanfilippo said.
-
- "My first impression was that they'd hit us with
a nuclear bomb. I figured it was just like the World Trade Center. And
I watched that burn from the (Jamaica) bay."
-
- Miles away from where Eugene Sanfilippo stood, at the
edge of a new Ground Zero, a mayor, a president's spokesman and a slew
of FAA officials were urging us to think "accident."
-
- But they were not standing in Rockaway Beach.
-
- They did not lose neighbors and friends across the bay
in Manhattan on Sept. 11. Black crepe still hangs here, along with the
memories of funerals for roughly 80 cops, firefighters and
stockbrokers.
-
- To look into Eugene Sanfilippo's eyes was to see there
were no coincidences.
-
- "Every day," he said, "I fear more and
more for the safety of my family. Why should we be made to suffer this
way?"
-
- Tommy Rayder, who works at JFK Airport, kept looking
past the fire barricades, toward a place where the autumn leaves had been
burnt off the trees.
-
- The homes that were gone belonged to neighbors Tommy
knew, "because in this part of the city, we all know
everybody."
-
- "I want to believe it was mechanical. I'm hoping
it was an accident. These days," Tommy Rayder sighed, "an
accident
is what you pray for.
-
- "That's a weird thing to say isn't it? Here, a jet
plane comes down in the middle of a neighborhood, and you pray it's an
accident because you can't bear to think they'd do it again to us.
-
- "Not here, not in Rockaway. You figure it couldn't
happen again cause we already suffered enough."
-
- Standing a few feet away, James Gill tried as best he
could to comfort his wife who appeared to be deep in the throes of this
new suffering.
-
- "We are up on the Cross Bay Bridge," James
Gill said, "driving over from Richmond Hill to look at a house.
-
- "My wife saw the whole thing. What she saw was an
explosion, way forward on the engines, sort of just behind the
cockpit.
-
- "I had to pull over, just there on the bridge.
Amanda
was hysterical. She dialed 911 on the cell phone, and just started to
scream,
`Help me! Help me!' "
-
- After being rocked by the sound of an initial explosion,
James Gill said he looked up to see American Flight 587 in flames and
attempting
to bank, only to wind up in a flat death spiral.
-
- "I was in munitions in both the Army and also the
Navy. I know what I heard and what I saw. That was no mechanical problem.
No way!"
-
- Howard Greenberg rushed home from his law office in
Manhattan
to find his wife shell-shocked.
-
- After seeing the plane fall, and believing it was going
to kill both her and her children, Howard Greenberg said his wife spent
the next few horrific hours running over body parts in the direction of
her neighbors' burning homes. She was carrying blankets and water.
-
- "I'm afraid," Howard Greenberg said, "that
my wife believes this is another incident. She'd probably tell you that
herself if she was able to talk. I'm afraid that's impossible.
-
- "Personally I might like to believe that it was
something else, but when you've been told that this whole area is being
considered as a crime scene, and that FBI agents are looking in your yard
and on your roof for evidence, for pieces of jet wreckage or human beings,
then it becomes hard to make a case for coincidence.
-
- "Now that all may change, but right now this is
simply too much to fathom."
-
- After being told to vacate her home, Lilly Reynolds
looked
into the faces of the strangers swarmed around her.
-
- "You know, after so many of our neighbors and
friends
died in September we were just getting back to some idea of normal, then
this happens.
-
- "My God, you say, they've done it again. What else
are we supposed to think?"
-
-
-
- © Copyright by the Boston Herald and Herald
Interactive Advertising Systems, Inc.
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|