Archive for March 31st, 2010
Faithful Assemble in Grateful Prayer for Lives Spared
By Pamela Ferdinand, Donna Gehrke and John Donnelly | August 31, 1992 for The Miami Herald
On the seventh day, South Dade celebrated life.
Parishioners sat on damp pews in churches without steeples or roofs. They looked up at open sky. They faced broken altars.
One Mennonite congregation in Florida City held outdoor services on eight folding chairs in front of their flattened church.
And yet even here at the heart of Hurricane Andrew’s destruction, churchgoers’ weariness evaporated at the sight of friends and neighbors not seen or heard from since the storm.
“I came here to see our family and friends and to see that everybody is alive together. I need to hear that everything will be OK,” said Maxine Plummer, 51.
Plummer said she was deeply moved by the sight of donations — thousands of bottles of water, diapers and stuffed animals — stacked in hallways at Christ the King Catholic Church at 16000 SW 112th Ave. near Perrine.
“My faith has been strengthened by seeing what people have donated and how they’re helping out,” Plummer said.
That, and the visions of hope spoken from pulpits, may have helped some people answer questions of why them, why their neighbors.
Some said they believed God was punishing them for their sins. Others said God was breaking down boundaries between people, between churches. In some communities, all-black churches and all-white churches joined together as one, divisions generations old that evaporated in seven days.
“We know scientifically why the hurricane came to Miami,” said Woo Lee, a Miami Lakes Presbyterian who conducts services three times a week in Homestead. “But religiously we believe strongly there is some other reason. We have to repent our sins.”
Roman Catholic Archbishop Edward McCarthy had a different answer: “The Lord permits these crises to develop because he’s calling us to a new level of humanity and virtue. We’ve always been told that we’re supposed to be suffering with Christ. This immediate morning, everyone is upset, but in the long term, there will be a little more meaning than today.
“You have to look at it in a broader perspective. There’s power in suffering.”
And so in hundreds of churches around South Dade, from the ripped-open to the air-conditioned and untouched, with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and several earthly powers that be moving from church to church, people left the pain aside for a few hours, celebrated fellowship and prayed for life.
In deep South Dade, the Princeton Church of the Nazarene off Southwest 248th Street was packed.
“I feel very up at the moment, happy because I’m here,” said Don Bernecker, 54, outside the church. “Everyone I know is here. There’s not a broken finger, not a broken bone, not a lost life.”
Nodding his head toward the congregation, as voices raised to the strains of Because I Live, he smiled:
“We can sing.”
Inside, under a vaulted white ceiling stained brown by rain, sobs of relief and empathy punctuated the Rev. James Spear’s sermon. Children on parents’ laps leaned through windows blown out by the storm.
At the back of the room, a man strained his arms holding a fan above their heads.
“We spent all week trying to board up our roofs and patch up our houses, but now we’ve come to give our thanks to the Lord,” Spear said. “I’m just thankful that I’m able to say to you, ‘Hello today.’ ”
Together, congregation members whispered, “Hello.”
Ten miles north of the worst of the disaster, members of the University Baptist Church in Coral Gables said prayers for their good fortune.
“I don’t have electricity, but many of my friends don’t have houses,” said Jelsys Perez, 28, of 7240 SW 13th Ter., as she waited to enter the standing-room-only church.
Over the loudspeaker, head pastor Dan Yeare exhorted the congregation, “We need to pray more. We need to pray now. We need to pray together.”
Next to Perez, Clara Jenkins also was waiting to get into the church.
“We lost everything,” said Jenkins, who lived off Old Cutler Road and 188th Street. “We praise the Lord and thank Him for being alive, the six of us. We were in a closet for five hours. I came today for inner strength to start all over again.”
Assistant pastor Gary Stroope’s voice boomed over the sound system: “People we know and love have lost their shelter. There are houses down, but Father, thank you that the home still exists.”
Clara Jenkins looked at her feet.
A friend tapped her on the shoulder. Jenkins turned and burst into tears. They hugged on and on and shook, weeping.
There was a crack above as Archbishop McCarthy rose to speak at Christ the King.
White tiles fell from the ceiling, crashing onto the pulpit. Gasps. Then silence as parishioners cleared the debris, then ordered roofers down from the top of the building. McCarthy walked a second time to the pulpit.
Before him: a couple of hundred people sitting on plastic over the pews, their feet in puddles, some weeping. “You’d better be careful,” he said, meaning the tiles above.
The archbishop praised the hundreds of people at Christ the King for helping other people even as they try to rebuild their own homes.
“I think we’re building up a great charge card with the Lord,” he said.
McCarthy said truckloads of food and supplies were arriving daily from parishes in Cleveland, Buffalo and elsewhere. The archbishop of Santiago, Cuba, sent a note of condolence and support, McCarthy said.
The Miami archbishop said he was moved by the suffering he has seen, including a badly dehydrated infant brought by a woman to St. Joachim Catholic Church at 11711 SW 193rd St.
“A nurse there saved her life,” he said. “There have been many beautiful things happening.”
McCarthy also tried to lighten the grim reality. He said he tried to comfort a sick relative by telling him that often the Lord’s gift was a cross to bear.
Replied the man: “I wish the Lord wasn’t so friendly to me.”
Gov. Lawton Chiles traveled from congregation to congregation, delivering messages of hope.
As sunlight streamed through the roof of the darkened Bethel Baptist Church in Richmond Heights, he said: “Somebody said this area will never be the same. I think that’s right — it’s going to be even better,” to a chorus of “Amen!”
And at St. Joachim’s in Perrine, amid aisles littered with stained glass, he quoted the Bible:
“You all are the harvest, and we will continue to get the labor in.”
Broward Gangs Moving into Suburbs
By Pamela Ferdinand | November 15, 1992 for The Miami Herald
The scene: An autumn evening in suburban Sunrise, St. Bernard’s Church fair. Cotton candy, kids squealing on the carnival rides.
In a parking lot, four teenage males confront a 17-year-old high school student.
Someone stabs him in the back. Then they run.
“Unknown gang members,” Sunrise police officer Edward Sanetti writes in his Nov. 5 report.
“Victim will be permanently scarred for life even after plastic surgery, according to the physician on scene,” the officer notes.
The chaos of gang violence — stabbings, beatings, shootings — seems an anomaly in Broward County. Few people have taken youth gangs in the suburbs seriously.
Until now.
* Until they shot and paralyzed 16-year-old Andre Gollett at a community center teen dance in Hollywood in April.
* Until they killed 18-year-old Ernesto Tapenes in a drive- by shooting on Hallandale Beach Boulevard in unincorporated Broward in July.
* And until they crashed an August party at Sawgrass Mills Residences in Sunrise and shattered the host’s windows with baseball bats, throwing a mailbox through the living room plate glass.
“All the juveniles are convinced that they can murder someone and walk away,” says Fort Lauderdale Det. David Nickerson.
Broward youth gangs aren’t the crack-dealing soldiers of Los Angeles. Nor are they the West Side Story turf punks of New York. But they are armed, dangerous — and increasingly violent.
“When the Davie Boys first started out, they were a bunch of guys who liked to drink beer and fight fist-to-fist,” says Det. Renae Griggs, a Davie juvenile crime officer. “Now they don’t use their fists. Half of the gang kids are packing weapons and the other half are starting to, because they’re scared.”
Gang kids are different from suburban kids who like to hang around malls. They possess identifying traits — colors, haircuts, clothing — and an exclusivity, performing rituals and crimes together.
To put it simply: When teenagers tattoo gang names and symbols on their ankles and knuckles and stow 9mm handguns under car seats, it is time to pay attention.
Especially when gangs make the headlines, as they did last week, here and elsewhere:
* Sheriff’s deputies arrested two teenage gang members for attempted murder in the July shooting of an Interstate 295 motorist in Jacksonville. A third teenager was arrested for stealing the car involved in the shooting.
* Fort Lauderdale police noted that an unlicensed underground nightclub, where a 19-year-old Pompano Beach woman was shot to death, is frequented by gangs and spray-painted with gang graffiti.
Says Dr. Ronald Huff, author of the book Gangs in America: “People should take gangs seriously. There isn’t any place that’s immune.”
Huff, consultant for the L.A. gang film Colors and a research director at Ohio State University, recently received a federal grant to study emerging gang problems.
He selected two sites: Denver and Broward County.
Broward’s western suburbs — the pristine bedroom landscapes of retirees and families — provide fertile territory for gang expansion:
Rapid urbanization and population growth. Substantial pockets of poverty. A rich racial and ethnic mix. And easy access to highways, like interstates 595 and 95.
Add to that the longings of male adolescence — recognition, protection and identity — and the concoction is explosive.
If crime statistics are accurate, the problem is getting worse. In December 1986, Broward police departments documented 45 members in two gangs.
Now, according to photographs and field interrogations, police document up to 3,500 members in 60 gangs.
Last year Fort Lauderdale investigators traced 100 specific individuals, so-called gangbangers. They counted 315 arrests — among them, 20 percent for violence; 11 percent for possession of weapons; 10 percent for narcotics and 18 percent for burglary.
“Some gangs get into drug dealing, but mostly their crime of choice is burglaries, purse-snatchings and strong arm robberies,” says Coral Springs Police Det. Scott Heysler. In a drive-by shooting, one gang hit the police chief’s conference room in 1989, Heysler says.
Take the youth gang, Most Powerful Nation that Doctor Tac belongs to. He is an 18-year-old Anglo from New York. He attends high school in Plantation and lives in a middle-class Davie townhouse with his mother and stepfather. The gang’s leader is Fear-1, a 16-year-old born in Puerto Rico. He works as a telephone salesman by day and takes high school classes at night.
The harmony within gangs is warped by the violence toward others.
When it comes to drawing a gun, says Dave Cortes, a retired detective, “a kid that is brought up in downtown Fort Lauderdale who has to fight every day of his life is no different than a mama’s boy with a $100 allowance.”
Cortes, a former Miami police officer, is known as South Florida’s police “gang guru.” He points out that more established gangs in Dade deal primarily in narcotics.
Most Broward police departments designate gang unit officers, such as Sunrise Police Det. Donald Cannon. He looks for gang symbols: A pitchfork. Six-pointed star. Colors: Green and black. Blue and white. And kids using hand signs: Right-hand “D’s” and “B’s.” Thumbs and forefingers splayed like “L’s.”
Gang members contend they have no choice but to resort to violence.
They fight with knives, AK-47s, nail-studded baseball bats, and the ultimate suburban armament — sawed-off golf clubs.
“We’ve been shot at many a time,” says Fear-1, lifting his shirt to expose the silver handle of a 9mm handgun tucked in his trousers. “But it’s a way of life. They roll on you or you roll on them.”
Gangs affect teenagers who want nothing to do with them.
Says a 17-year-old North Lauderdale youth whose friend quit a gang: “We left a club and a gang called LaFamilia kept driving by (U.S.) 441 and Atlantic (Avenue). They threw their sign out the window and started shooting. They turned around and came back, and I ran underneath a car. Nobody got hit.”
But sometimes someone does get hit.
On April 18, Andre Gollett attended a teen dance at the Northeast Community Center in Hollywood. At 1 a.m., a gunman
from a gang fired a bullet into his back.
Now Gollett, a South Broward High School student, is paralyzed. Reliant on a wheelchair for the rest of his life, he doesn’t want to talk about that night.
Police charged Robert Ramon “Tico” Brush, 16, with attempted murder.
But fear of arrest does little to deter gang violence.
At age 16, Craig Bonaventura of Lauderhill plotted a drive-by shooting after a rival gang crashed his birthday party and started hitting people with baseball bats.
Bonaventura’s gang fired 13 bullets into the Sunrise home of Hans Mullings. He belonged to a rival gang, the O.C. Express.
This occurred Oct. 15, 1989, and Broward Circuit Court Judge Robert Carney sentenced Bonaventura to eight years in a Gainesville correctional facility.
At sentencing, the judge said he wanted to send a message: “The court is well aware of the gang violence . . . and that juveniles look to see what the courts do when these types of offenses occur . . . ”
From jail, Bonaventura wrote the judge: “When I get out of the Department of Corrections, I’m going to put my life back together in a whole new way!”
Fresh out of prison after two years, Bonaventura formed a new gang called La Vida, or Life. Broward Sheriff’s deputies arrested him Nov. 5 for disorderly conduct, his fifth arrest this year.
“Everyone in my gang is ruthless,” says Bonaventura, coral red and black beads dangling from his bare chest. At 19, he is the gang’s “godfather.” “We don’t just fight. Whatever it takes, shooting, stabbing, whatever.”
Other gangs, too, possess established hierarchies with first, second and third officers. Most Powerful Nation’s “godfather” supervises a “fight department” and an “initiation department.”
Some gangs rely on little kids called “footies” or “pee- wees” for money.
“We’re down with them,” says an 11-year-old boy named Alex, sitting astride a bicycle in a Davie shopping center parking lot.
His friend, Patrick, a 12-year-old holding a cigarette, adds: “If they need tokens or money, we let them borrow it. We trust them. They take us places and give us rides and stuff.”
While some gangs split into local chapters, police say the high mobility of Broward gangs makes turf — a traditional gang trait — rare.
“We ride out all night, go to malls looking for trouble, recruit other people and find other gangs and fight,” says Bonaventura.
Typically, gangs meet at places like McSugar’s video arcade in Davie, Subway on Riverside Drive in Coral Springs, and Don Carter’s bowling alleys in Tamarac and Sunrise late at night.
“They get different factions that come in and the next thing you know, there’s a big fight,” says Stephen Anthony, manager of McSugar’s. “When they come here, they don’t come to play the games. I’m tired of playing nursemaid to these kids.”
Broward gangs conduct their own rituals. Initiation often involves fighting up to six gang members for two minutes or more.
If you’re conscious afterward, you’re in.
Loyalty is constantly tested, as it was at McSugar’s one recent Friday night.
Away from the din of arcade games, six members of Most Powerful Nation retreat to the restroom to talk strategy. They’ve heard at least two other gangs — Insane Crips from Hollywood, Davie Boys from Davie — are on their way.
“I don’t care, dog,” says J-Dog, a black-haired 16-year- old. “We gotta get somethin’. They gonna come shootin’ and we ain’t got nothin’.”
Doctor Tac leans against the porcelain sink. He bows his head so that the rim of his backward black-and-white Raiders cap sticks straight up in the air.
J-Dog wants him to steal one of his father’s guns.
“I gotta think,” Doctor Tac says, crossing his arms on his chest and staring at the floor. “I don’t want to make the wrong decision.”
Minutes later, he is on his way home to get the gun.
A new trend in family planning: Young women of limited means have tubes tied
By Pamela Ferdinand | April 13, 1993 for The Miami Herald
Miami–Young, low-income women in Florida — most of them already mothers — are more and more having their tubes tied. At age 22, Margaret Mack ended her child-bearing days. She lived with her three small children, mother, and unemployed brother in a cheap, two-bedroom apartment. Medicaid card in hand, she went to a Broward health clinic. She felt she could not afford more children and disliked condoms and the pill.
“The lady tried to make me not do it. I was too young, she said, but I told her this was what I wanted.”
Nationwide, sterilization is the leading form of birth control for women over 30. Most younger women rely on the pill. But Medicaid statistics in Florida show that, increasingly, sterilization is the contraceptive of choice for women like Margaret Mack — young and poor.
In the past four years, tubal ligations rose more than 30 percent among low-income women younger than 25 in Florida. Medicaid spending for their procedures nearly tripled to almost $2.7 million.
Many of the young, low-income women who choose sterilization say they cannot afford — financially or emotionally — to have more children. They have already tried other methods of birth control and are either unfamiliar with or unwilling to try newer, long-term contraceptives. So they decided on a permanent solution.
“When you don’t have money and you have babies, it’s a nightmare,” said Rickie Solinger, author of Wake Up Little Susie, a book on single pregnancy. “Women who don’t have resources are feeling pushed to . . . where sterilization is the only responsible thing they can do. That’s new, and that’s different.”
For the fiscal year starting July 1, 1989, 6,353 low-income women were sterilized in Florida. In the nine months after July 1, 1992, an estimated 8,673 low-income women underwent the procedure, according to Tallahassee-based Consultec Inc., a billing agency for the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.
For the 1989-90 fiscal year, 2,676 women under age 25 chose the procedure. The number since July 1, 1992, increased to 3,538, Consultec reported. In Dade and Broward, most were black.
Women are considered sterile immediately following the procedure, which blocks or separates each fallopian tube so that eggs cannot travel from the ovaries to the uterus.
Young women — many of whom had teenage pregnancies — choose sterilization for various reasons. The lack of federal and state funding for abortion in Florida does not appear to be a major factor, health care workers agree.
“Most women who want to get abortions generally do, even if it’s a financial hardship,” said Michael Policar, vice president of medical affairs for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “I’ve never counseled a single woman who said, ‘I’m considering sterilization because if I get pregnant again, nobody will pay for the abortion.’ ”
Health clinic workers say they hear other reasons for sterilization: It eliminates the hassle of daily birth control and its potential failure and side effects. Male partners often refuse to use contraception or to undergo vasectomies.
Also, not all young women are reliable users of contraceptives. Remembering to take pills can be difficult, prescriptions must be refilled, and diaphragms can be awkward to manage, clinic workers suggest.
Many young women are unfamiliar with or are unwilling to try newer, legal long-term contraceptives such as Norplant, time-release capsules placed under the skin every five years, and Depo-Provera, a synthetic hormone injected every three months. Medicaid covers both options, as well as other forms of contraception including the pill and diaphragm.
Alma Rodriguez, 24 years old, mother for the first time at 16, now the mother of four, says she has never heard of Norplant. She and her husband, Geraldo, eloped and left Mexico when she was 14. Ten years later, they live in a Davie mobile home with their children. After rent, they have less than $200 a week to spend.
Her mother and an older sister both had sterilizations. Last year, after an unplanned pregnancy, Rodriguez did the same. “I feel fine,” Rodriguez said. “I think I feel fine.”
Pressed, she said that she is not entirely sure that she will not want more children in the future.
Her uncertainty is not unusual. To be sterilized under Medicaid rules, the woman must be 21 and she must sign a consent form. To minimize second thoughts, and to prevent sterilization abuse by doctors, the government requires a 30-day waiting period between the signing and the date of surgery.
Still, a 1988 study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York shows that the younger the woman, the higher the chances of regret.
“You take a woman who’s 40, she doesn’t want to risk pregnancy between 40 and 50,” said Sally Skull, HRS operations and management consultant in Broward. “But a 21- to 24-year-old who makes the decision — there are too many years that her life circumstances can change.”
Dr. Garry Wachtel, a private Tamarac gynecologist, agreed, calling tubal ligation a “heavy-duty decision.” Chances of reversal are slim, he said, and that procedure is expensive.
“I tell these patients to consider the possibility that something may happen to their children,” he said.
Others praise these young, low-income women.
“They don’t want any more children because they’ve got all they can handle,” said Joyce Tarnow, administrator of The Womens’ Clinic in Fort Lauderdale. “I admire the fact that they are taking control of their lives.”
The midwife option
By Pamela Ferdinand | August 1, 1993 for The Miami Herald
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.–Margaret Dynes, her cheeks flushed, strands of long blond hair stuck to her sweaty forehead, clutches floral bedsheets printed with yellow roses.
She curls her back into a stack of pillows, parts her lips and closes her eyes as she heaves her hips and pelvis forward with the contractions.
“Ooooohhh,” she moans, grunting through clenched teeth.
A midwife, perched on the end of the bed, tells Margaret to hold her breath a little bit, to save all her strength for the next one.
She asks, “How does it feel to push? Does it feel good?”
The contractions pass. “I’m so tired, I just want to sleep,” Margaret says.
It will be at least five more hours before she does.
*
Birth is normal. It happens every day.
For prospective parents, though, each birth is remarkable and a little mysterious. Most feel comfortable in hospitals with obstetricians and emergency technology at their fingertips.
They don’t necessarily want to use the machinery, but they want to know it’s there in case something goes wrong. And things do go wrong.
Still, hospital births with obstetricians can be frustrating — emotionally, financially and physically. Some women may find the experience daunting and the surroundings unfriendly.
More and more healthy pregnant women are choosing midwives, and sometimes home birth, as an alternative.
Margaret and Tom Dynes decided to have a home birth with a licensed midwife, Janice Heller, after two hospital births.
Tom, a carpenter, met Margaret through friends at Our Father’s House church. They married and tried for a year and a half to have children. Just when they were about to give up, move out of their North Miami house and travel in a motor home, Margaret became pregnant.
Some of their friends had home births with midwives when having babies at home was “the thing to do,” Margaret recalled.
But she and Tom, 22 and 25 years old when she first became pregnant, wanted the security of a doctor in a white lab coat and electronic monitors.
They anticipated the joy of seeing and holding their newborn. They did not want to take any chances.
*
That first time, five years ago, Margaret spent most of the day with mild contractions, watching the winter Olympics on television.
Her water broke on the way to North Shore Medical Center in Miami.
Nurses laid Margaret flat on her back and hooked her up to an intravenous tube to relieve her dehydration. They attached an internal monitor to the baby’s head.
About nine hours later, still not dilated more than four centimeters, she groaned in agony. An anesthesiologist injected a regional anesthetic, hospital records show. It relieved Margaret’s pain, but numbed her urge to urinate and her normal, instinctual urge to push.
Her bladder swelled like a grapefruit. Then the contractions slowed.
To speed labor, a nurse injected a synthetic form of the hormone that stimulates uterine contractions.
The drug-induced roller coaster caused the baby’s heartbeat to drop, Margaret said. Tom watched as nurses fitted Margaret with an oxygen mask.
“My feeling was that I was in the way,” he said. “I was sleeping on the cold, hard floor, nobody wanted to answer my questions.”
Midway through Margaret’s labor, Tom wrote his wife and unborn child a letter: “Though it probably has been foolish, I have despaired of your lives today. To sit here by your side and see all the tubes, to see your face as your body screams in pain, my heart has almost burst with love and fear and hope.”
Margaret dilated, and nurses sped her to the delivery room. They covered her legs with a sheet, propped her feet in stirrups, and urged her to push. The doctor made a cut to widen the vaginal opening.
Abigail “Abby” Dynes was born February 19, 1988, at 6.6 pounds after 34 hours of labor.
Margaret felt like she was going into shock and began trembling. She could not hold the baby.
*
April 19, 4 a.m.
Margaret’s water breaks. The Dynes head to Linda and Erik Sampson’s Davie home. Its lights pierce the damp, dark morning.
Linda, Margaret’s best friend, makes coffee. Erik pours corn flakes for seven sleepy-eyed children. The midwife, Cynthia Feinberg, takes a mug of coffee and gets acquainted.
Cynthia is a stranger to the Dynes. Janice, Margaret’s regular midwife, is on call at another birth. It’s not unusual for midwives to come to each other’s rescue, and Cynthia, a mother of three, runs her own practice in Miami. Without the rapport usual between midwives and their clients, she is counting on Tom to support his wife.
Her unobtrusiveness puts Margaret and Tom at ease, though they are disappointed Janice will not attend the birth.
A lullaby tape plays in a corner of the low-ceilinged bedroom. Two lamps throw shadows over an Indian quilt tossed over a bookshelf. A knickknack reads, “Happiness is being married to your best friend.”
Dressed in a flowery, oversize T-shirt and white athletic socks, Margaret sits in the middle of a handcrafted wooden bed and sips water.
The midwife’s birthing assistant, Marguerite Spillane, wraps a cuff around Margaret’s arm and takes her blood pressure. It’s normal.
*
Janice, a licensed Hollywood midwife since 1984, attended her first birth by ultimatum.
“This woman called me and said, ‘I don’t care, if you don’t come, it’s going to be me and my dog,’ ” Janice recalled. At the time, in 1976, she was a midwife-in-training.
She has since assisted more than 1,200 births. Most took place at homes, and only one resulted in a serious problem.
She is one of 34 licensed midwives in Florida. Also called “direct-entry” midwives, most attend home births or births at one of 21 birth centers statewide. About 329 certified nurse-midwives practice in Florida, assisting births in hospitals, birthing centers, and a limited number of homes. They work closely with physicians and are registered nurses with advanced childbirth training.
State laws now require three years of midwifery education for new direct-entry midwives. Both nurse-midwives and direct-entry midwives are regulated by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
Unlicensed midwives are illegal in Florida.
Janice typifies most modern direct-entry midwives, who are committed to a safe birth, preferably — but not necessarily — at home. Midwife means “with woman,” and they believe birth is a normal event, not a pathological process requiring constant medical intervention.
Janice planned a home birth for herself in 1986, but needed intravenous fluids and transferred herself to Hollywood Memorial Hospital. She gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Shanti Rose, in two pushes on a hallway stretcher.
It was no mean feat for a heavy woman who has used crutches since she had polio at age 3. Raised in upstate New York by a surgeon father and nurse mother, Janice originally worked as a massage therapist and pharmacology research assistant.
After attending births with two housemates, both midwives, she got hooked. Now, her music-composer husband takes care of their home and midwifery is a full-time job.
“You fall completely in love with the birth experience,” she said. “Husbands find a great appreciation for their wives, and women really get to acknowledge their strength.
“Who a woman is and how her life works for her is really going to be how her birth is,” she said. “If you are this radical, crisis-oriented person, chances are that your birth is going to be crisis-oriented.”
*
April 19, 6:46 a.m.
Margaret’s contractions fall three to four minutes apart. Her cervix readies for the birth, laying thin and smooth against the baby’s head.
Supplies are ready, including: hot compresses, bulb syringe, umbilical tape, clamps, and olive oil. Cynthia also carries oxygen, local anesthetic, pitocin — the synthetic hormone used to increase contractions — and vitamin K.
Tom huddles with Cynthia in the hallway. He looks worried.
“I get the impression from Marguerite that there’s something I should know that I don’t know,” he says.
Cynthia detected a slight fetal bowel movement in Margaret’s fluid. If the baby breathes the substance, it can cause pneumonia or death.
Cynthia must rule out any immediate fetal distress by checking the heart tones. If they are normal, the light staining may be evidence of temporary distress prior to labor and there’s no need for panic.
From prenatal classes, Tom knows that midwives use a DeLee suction tool to clear the baby’s breathing passages after the head emerges.
“It’s your call,” he tells Cynthia. “If we need to go (to Memorial Hospital), we’re on the way.”
With an an electronic instrument that uses sonic waves to detect a baby’s heartbeat, Cynthia listens to Margaret’s belly.
She hears regular heart tones. They stay.
*
Abigail’s brother, Jonathan, was born on March 15, 1989, at Hialeah Hospital after 14 hours of labor.
Margaret’s water broke at midnight, one month early. She knew that could increase the odds of a Caesarean section, when a physician cuts open the uterus to deliver the baby.
Two years later, in 1991, Hialeah Hospital would deliver a higher percentage of its babies by Caesarean than any other hospital in Florida — one of every four.
Margaret followed instructions when nurses hooked her to an intravenous tube, gave her a synthetic hormone to stimulate contractions and laid her flat on her back.
“They gave me an enema, then they shaved off all my pubic hair, which was ridiculous, but I didn’t want to make waves,” she said.
All of a sudden, the urge to push took over. She said she yelled for a doctor, but the nurses shouted not to push because she was not yet 10 centimeters dilated.
“That baby came out in two contractions and probably could have come in one if they weren’t telling me not to push,” Margaret said.
A borderline preemie at 5.14 pounds, Jonathan was taken away, and Margaret said she did not see him again until the next day. No one told her why her waters broke early.
“What happened with Abby helped prepare us for what happened with Jon-Jon,” Margaret said. “You’re so alone, so isolated from people who care about you.”
*
April 19, 7:30 a.m.
Margaret leans against a bedpost and sips Carbo Fuel, a high-carbohydrate drink.
The contractions strengthen. She is restless, hot and sweaty. Her legs feel like jelly.
“You look so beautiful,” Tom tells her. A friend’s 6-month- old baby cries in the next room. “Hearing him is a perfect sound.”
*
After what they considered two unpleasant births, Margaret and Tom chose home birth with a midwife for their third child.
Margaret’s best friend, Linda, gave birth to four children at home with Janice.
“I knew how good she was, just from Linda,” Margaret said. “But there’s always that element of fear until you have a home birth and get to know the midwife.”
She and Tom loved the idea of having a child surrounded by family and friends. Cost was also a factor, she said.
The first birth, not covered by insurance, cost $5,000; the second, which was, cost $500 in co-payments. Janice charges $3,200, with a sliding scale for clients who cannot afford the full fee.
So, on Tuesdays, Margaret joined the steady stream of women who flowed through Janice’s clinic door.
“I just don’t trust (the hospitals),” said Margaret, worried at 30 weeks into her pregnancy about another premature delivery. “I feel that you know much more about what you’re doing than they did.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but it’s not really true,” Janice said. “We just talk more.”
*
April 19, 8:30 a.m.
The contractions come faster. Margaret’s belly tightens. She releases great whooshes of air.
“I’m trying to relax, but it’s hard,” she says.
Marguerite recognizes this restlessness as a sign of transition, the dilation period from six or seven to ten centimeters when a woman struggles to concentrate — the time when some women report out-of-body, near-death experiences.
“Don’t worry that you’re having trouble focusing now, it’s part of the process,” Marguerite says. “The contractions are getting hard, the baby’s advancing.”
*
As a state requirement for direct-entry midwife care, Margaret and Tom attended a seven-week session of prenatal classes.
“It’s important that you’re comfortable with your midwife,” said their instructor, Hollywood midwife-in-training Debbie Marin. “If there’s something she’s said to you or done, you have to be up front with her.”
She and Janice weed out parents who may be inappropriate, and unsafe, for home birth. They don’t take women who smoke, drink or use drugs. They don’t take people who are uncommunicative and uncommitted to prenatal care and breast- feeding.
“You can’t go home with them and say, ‘You have to eat right,’ ” Debbie said. “They have to be responsible people.”
*
April 19, 9 a.m.
Margaret lies on her left side with a pillow between her legs to relieve her lower back pain. The contractions follow one after another in less than a minute.
In the living room, Erik plays guitar and sings to the children.
“Once there was a windy day, a beautiful day to have a baby. A lot of people came to help out,” he sings.
Cynthia presses a warm compress between her legs, stimulating circulation and making the tissues more supple and more liable to stretch, not tear.
“Oh no, oh no,” Margaret moans, her legs quivering.
“Your body knows just what to do,” Cynthia says. “It’s perfect.”
“Look at me, OK, OK, yeah, sweetheart,” Tom says, massaging her back.
Linda kneels on the bed and bows her head, eyes closed, praying.
*
On this clinic day in late March, Margaret, bags under her eyes, looked peaked.
“Your iron’s 11.9,” Janice said. “You’re doing real good.”
“We’re on top of this,” Margaret said. “It’s very comforting.”
She has decided to give birth at her best friend’s house, where she feels most peaceful.
“So what’s my next clue?”
“Your next clue is probably going to be contractions.”
Margaret laughed and said, “Good clue.”
*
April 19, 10 a.m.
At the end of a contraction, with two gloved fingers, Cynthia feels and notes the condition of the cervix and the position of the baby’s head.
As the next contraction begins, she moves the lip of the cervix up and away, out of the baby’s way.
The baby’s damp brown hair peeks between Margaret’s legs and retreats. Margaret reaches down to touch his head, then pushes.
“A couple more like that and you’ll be done,” Cynthia tells her.
“I wish.”
Marguerite briefly fits Margaret with an oxygen mask for energy.
Cynthia lifts Margaret’s legs and slips a clean absorbent pad underneath her. When the baby is born, she will remove the wet, blood-soaked pads. The bed will be spotless.
*
The baby won’t come unless Margaret and Tom resolve any tension between them, Janice counseled Margaret as the due date, April 10, approached.
Birth is as much emotional, mental, psychological and spiritual as biological, midwives believe. Janice suggested they go on a “date.”
During Margaret’s past two pregnancies, Tom did not confront the emotional trauma of childhood sexual abuse by his mother, who later committed suicide. Nor did he discuss doubts about his ability to be a good father, which made it difficult for him to bond with his own son, Jonathan.
When Margaret’s sonogram showed their third child was a boy, he felt disappointed at first. But this time, he and Margaret discussed their concerns.
“Nothing is hidden,” Tom said, during their Saturday night “date” at Steak and Ale in North Miami.
“Our relationship goes deeper,” Margaret said. “I’ve been much more excited about being a mother again.”
They shared, too, their expectations about a home birth with a midwife.
“I look forward to being around people I love, playing my own tapes, being able to eat and drink and take a hot shower or bath,” she said.
Tom said he was torn.
“I’m a real private person, I don’t even want the midwife there,” he said. “But this other part of me wants people who love me and people I love near. I want it to be like a holiday.”
*
April 19, 10:40 a.m.
Cynthia massages Jason’s emerging head and the surrounding area with olive oil.
With her fingers, she eases the pressure around the top and bottom of the vaginal opening and checks his scalp color for pinkish-blue or purple tones, both good signs.
She clears his mouth with a suction and feels for an umbilical cord around his neck. She finds part of the cord.
In a split second, she slips a finger down along the back of the baby’s neck, flexes the finger and grasps the cord. With her other hand, she unwinds it.
Neither Tom nor Margaret notices.
“He’s so beautiful, honey,” Tom says.
Margaret’s face is transformed.
*
With the baby overdue by nearly a week, Janice and Margaret spoke about God and accepting that she cannot control when he will be born.
“By next week, if you haven’t had the baby, I’ll have to do an ultrasound,” Janice said. “You would probably be induced by now if you were going to an obstetrician.”
Her guess, after an internal exam: Jason will be about 7 1/ 2 pounds.
“There may be a minute or an hour when you get really blue and think you’re going to be pregnant forever,” Janice empathized.
“Before it was like, it’s going to happen today,” Margaret said. “Now it’s like, is it ever going to happen?”
*
April 19, 10:48 a.m.
Jason pops out, a limp white body, a blood-streaked reddish face.
Tears stream down Tom’s face, “He’s perfect.”
Cynthia massages the baby into movement. He cries, and she wraps him in a blue towel and places him into Margaret’s arms.
“My baby, oh my baby,” she whispers.
Linda cuts the cord.
“I’m so glad it’s over,” Margaret says. “I was so scared I was going to have to be induced again.”
Cynthia weighs Jason with fisherman-type hanging scales, suspending the baby like a stork with its bundle.
Jason Dynes is seven pounds, eight ounces.
“If we had gone to the hospital, they would have whisked him away,” Tom says.
“This was a total healing.”
10,000 cases, and AIDS endures; As the epidemic reaches a milestone, awareness and indifference grow
By Pamela Ferdinand | April 9, 1995 for The Boston Globe
The death certificate for a man in his late 30s puzzled Boston funeral director Kenneth F. Bennett when he saw it 13 years ago. It read, “acquired immune deficiency syndrome,” and a mystified Bennett remembers calling a state health official to ask precisely what that meant.
“He indicated that this was the beginning of a very serious epidemic,” Bennett recalled.
That case, in 1982, was one of the state’s first reported AIDS-related deaths. Today, Bennett handles three such deaths a week at his Kenmore Square funeral home.
Last month, the state passed a grim milestone when the 10,000th person in Massachusetts was diagnosed with AIDS, of whom some 6,000 have died. Another 30,000 have tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the disease.
Now the leading cause of death for those aged 25-44 in the United States, the face of AIDS has changed dramatically in Massachusetts and the nation. Women account for 50 percent of new infections. The percentage of cases among heterosexuals increased from 9.2 percent in 1993 to 10.3 percent in 1994. The as-yet uncurable disease has produced a social culture bound by fear, loss and love. It has led to medical breakthroughs, anti-discrimination laws, improved sex education and expanded social services.
Nearly 2,000 people living with AIDS or HIV celebrate Thanksgiving together each year in Hynes Auditorium. Hundreds pray in an annual healing service every winter at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End.
Awareness has grown, with admissions by celebrities like Greg Louganis and Magic Johnson. But so has indifference. Kids can recite virus facts and bodily fluids – but don’t change their sexual behavior. Discrimination persists, and some fear compassion will dwindle in a climate of funding cuts.
Larry Kessler, executive director of the AIDS Action Committee, said of the state’s 10,000th diagnosis of AIDS: “It’s a good reminder that while you weren’t paying attention, something has been happening, and 10,000 is no small potatoes. They are your neighbors, your co-workers and your friends. And now they have AIDS.”
Robert Allen, 36, of Methuen, had three sexual partners in his lifetime. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1985.
A slender man with blue eyes, reddish-blond cropped hair and a moustache, Allen thought he was going to die several years ago. So he spent his savings on gifts for nieces and nephews and trips to Puerto Rico and Mexico.
Now he is a longtime survivor, living in a public housing development filled with elderly residents because his savings were depleted. His mother hasn’t spoken to him since he went public with his homosexuality by making an AIDS quilt panel in memory of his partner of seven years, Steven, who died in 1991 and whose photo remains on the side of his refrigerator.
Allen has had meningitis and suffers badly from neuropathy, which makes his muscles ache, and occasional night sweats, which drench his sheets. But he still volunteers for an AIDS agency three times a week and takes a daily handful of pills.
“I take really good care of myself, plenty of sleep, make sure I eat right and make sure people don’t stress me out,” says Allen. “I stopped going to funerals unless it’s a really close friend. I just can’t do any more funerals.”
In 1983, people diagnosed with HIV typically lived six months. Now they live an average of 30 months from diagnosis, doctors say.
Improved doses and combinations of drugs such as AZT and 3TC help, and antibiotics prevent related infections, including pneumocystis, which causes severe pneumonia. Researchers are also testing new drugs and investigating gene therapy, and they recently reported the first case of an infant infected at birth who fended off the virus by his first birthday.
An informal poll by the Harvard AIDS Institute last year showed 50 leading AIDS scientists and policy makers believe that AIDS will eventually be effectively treated and cured. Many are also calling for efforts to develop international vaccines and surveillance of lethal, foreign HIV strains. At a conference Wednesday, institute chairman Max Essex called for national screening to see if yet more infectious HIV subtypes are moving into the United States.
Generally, someone infected with the HIV virus in the last two years with a white blood cell count above 200, who eats properly and exercises, stands a decent chance of maintaining a good quality of life, said Jerome Groopman, a New England Deaconess Hospital hematologist and Harvard University professor of medicine.
“The disease is not cured, but I think we are on the right road,” Groopman said. “There’s much better understanding and empathy on the part of the academic community and more trust on the part of the HIV-infected community, so that has removed a lot of the conflict that led to people rejecting mainstream treatment.”
In Massachusetts, dozens of clinics and social service agencies have sprung up since AIDS first appeared in the early 1980s. In Cambridge, for instance, with the highest number of AIDS cases in Middlesex County, the Zinberg Clinic saw 50 people in 1990. It now treats 400 people with HIV annually, a quarter of whom have AIDS.
The state budget for AIDS-related services, slated to remain level next year, increased to $ 37.5 million in 1995 from $ 18.2 million in 1992, Department of Public Health figures show.
About 1,300 injection drug users participate in pilot needle exchange programs in Cambridge and Boston. New residences for people with HIV and AIDS are planned for the Fenway and Beacon Hill. Religious groups opposed to homosexuality and contraception run support groups, meals, hospices and special functions for those with AIDS, including the annual Catholic Church healing service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
“Last year, the cardinal went to one young man holding a 2-year-old,” said Sister Zita Fleming, director of the Archdiocese of Boston’s Office of Aids Ministry. “I was close enough to say, ‘Which one is to be anointed?’ and the father said, ‘Both.’ You just weep.”
Increasingly, the courts will have to determine the rights of HIV-infected people, from issues of confidentiality and mandatory testing to definitions of “reasonable accommodation” when employees with HIV or AIDS miss work, said Janice H. Platner, executive director of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders.
“We’ve had discrimination cases in emergency rooms and all sorts of places that should know better,” Platner said. “People are discriminating and not apologizing for it.”
Catherine Gaudette, 25, of Milford, says she suffered for months with chronic pain because doctors accustomed to treating men failed to detect her gynecological infections. She contracted HIV after her college freshman year through unprotected sex with her fiance. She tested positive in 1990 and was diagnosed with AIDS in August 1992.
By then, she had discovered that the former fiance, who told her he had cancer, had been keeping two secrets: He was a heroin addict and he had a gay lover.
Gaudette says she transferred to four colleges to complete a psychology degree, twice because of discrimination. One professor told AIDS jokes in class. Two roommates broke into her locked file cabinets, discovered HIV pamphlets and tried to get her thrown out of school.
“Being a straight woman with this disease has been very lonely because people automatically assume that I’m a drug user,” said Gaudette, who speaks to children about AIDS and appears healthy at 5-feet-7 and 165 pounds. “I’m not sick looking. It scares the crap out of them, actually, because they’re just like, ‘I thought you could tell by looking.’ ”
AIDS has become an illness transmitted without regard for sexual identity, gender or race. Half of the state’s residents with AIDS now live outside Greater Boston, up from 33 percent in 1986. But many suburban professionals are reluctant to come forward, said Madelaine St. Amand, executive director of Strongest Link.
While state officials say the disease has shifted to new populations, others say recent statistics reflect greater attention to minority communities still in need of housing, culturally sensitive education and medical treatment.
In one case, HIV-related lesions on a Latino man’s skin were not recognized because they were brown, not purple, said Nicolas P. Carballeira, director of the Latino Health Institute. That has changed to the extent that “a thin Latino coughing very often is misdiagnosed with HIV or AIDS because people now expect minority communities to be infected,” he said.
“AIDS is directly killing the minority community,” said Jeffrey Beard, executive director of the Cambridge Men of Color Task Force, who lost his brother to AIDS. “The challenge is outreach, to get to where people are.”
Injection drug users, many of whom are female and minority, represent a growing segment of the AIDS population as the purity of heroin increases and its price falls. Statistics show AIDS transmission through injections statewide have nearly tripled in the past 10 years to 47 percent of all cases diagnosed in 1994.
Crack smoking and oral sex are also “extraordinarily dangerous” because the pipe leaves burns in the mouth, said Mark Kleiman, associate public policy professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
He suggested that police crack down on places where people shoot heroin, rather than arrest those who illegally circulate clean needles, to prevent sharing. Massachusetts requires prescriptions for needles and syringes, and police respond they are merely enforcing the law.
Said Kleiman, “The law enforcement community has not been interested in AIDS control, and the AIDS community has not been interested in law enforcement.”
Rafael Fainz, 21, a gay Latino man from Haverhill with jet black hair and brown eyes, estimates that he had sex with 200 partners, including many strangers at highway rest stops, but had unprotected sex with only two or three of them.
“That’s the important thing. It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality of sex that you have with each one,” says Fainz, who was diagnosed with HIV at age 18. “When you’re out in the woods and stuff, you really don’t have the availability of condoms.”
In his Catholic home and parochial school, Fainz says no one ever spoke to him about sex and told him AIDS was a “gay thing.” What little he learned he learned through the Boston Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Youth.
The youngsters Fainz speaks to as a health educator at the Latino Health Institute either believe AIDS can’t happen to them or are absolutely convinced it will, he says: “They think, ‘It’s hopeless, so why not just do it and have fun and go out with a smile?’ ”
A new generation is at risk, and some suggest AIDS activism has been misguided, treating the symptom and not the disease.
“Don’t have sex outside of marriage, and don’t do drugs,” said Nancy Sutton, executive director of Family First in Needham. “The conventional wisdom is that if you use condoms and sterilized needles, you won’t have any problems. But that’s ridiculous. Eventually condoms break and needles get dirty.” While AIDS activists push for condom use and safe-sex education, others, like Sutton, say abstinence is the only answer.
Felicia Swan, 17, says she knows not to have sex without a condom. But the Boston teen-ager adds, “Guys know about AIDS, but they think they’re too good to catch it.”
A memory laid to rest; Lost love returns to haunt man after 44-year marriage to another
By Pamela Ferdinand | June 9, 1996 for The Boston Globe.
Brookline, Mass.–Edwin Barker, 76, happily married for 44 years, had a vivid dream one night about an old flame.
They were together again back in the 1940s, listening to Arthur dexadrene on the Esplanade in Boston, watching Jimmy Stewart films at the Brookline Theater, walking arm-in-arm as couples do.
It got Barker to wondering. Tugged at his conscience a bit: Whatever happened to Mary Catherine MacKay? Was she sending him some kind of message? And did she find happiness after he left her brokenhearted?
She was the girl who never spoke ill of anyone and for whom apologies came too little, too late. And when Barker reached back into the past for her, his message in an April 20 newspaper ad resonated in the hearts and imaginations of anyone who ever wondered about an old love or failed romance.
“A letter for Mary Catherine MacKay,” the ad read. “We were in love with each other at the time. You were relying on me, and I let you down. I am truly sorry for what happened, and I lost you forever . . . I don’t have many years left, and it would do my heart good to know that she has had a happy life. Please someone let me know.”
Barker didn’t even want to see her. He needed to find out what happened to her. And he did. But a reunion was not to be.
“Usually when I dream something, I forget it,” Barker said from his home in Clearwater, Fla. “But this one was so real that I thought, ‘I wonder how she made out?’ because I still cared.”
Which did not please Mildred, his wife: “How would you feel after 40-some years if your husband was trying to find someone else?”
Mary Catherine MacKay was virtually the girl next door. She lived with her parents and sister two houses away from the Barker home on Thorndike Street.
They met at choir rehearsal. Eddie was 20, tall and dark-haired, a grocery store clerk. Mary was 23, with brown hair and a reedy frame. She worked at the Woolworth 5&10 in Newton Centre and won him over with kindness.
They fell in love in 1940. As they courted, debates raged in local newspapers over Roosevelt’s foreign policy and local schools considered opening machine shops for defense workers. They went to concerts on the Esplanade and sometimes the movies when he could afford it. Her parents found no reason not to approve.
Suddenly, without warning, Eddie ended it one February day in 1941. They stood outside her house, and he told her he was moving to Philadelphia for a railroad job. She pleaded, said she had counted on him. He gave no further explanation.
There was no way she could have known what was going on in his adolescent mind. He was still reeling from the deaths of two previous girlfriends and worried, foolishly yet sincerely, that his love for Mary put her at risk of dying young too.
His first girlfriend, a 17-year-old named Nona, whom his uncle adopted as a young girl, was murdered in Vermont in 1937 by a jealous farmhand, Barker said. The 14-year-old boy stole their love letters, read them and tore them up. Then he shot Nona in the head as she read a Sears & Roebuck catalog before dinner.
Eddie’s second attempt at romance, a friend of Nona’s named Rosemary, died minutes before their first date. Famished after church and nervous about seeing him, she ate a hasty lunch. Acute indigestion brought on heart failure. A priest was giving her last rites when Eddie came to pick her up for a Sunday matinee.
“I had this crazy notion at the time that I was never going to get involved with a woman again because every time I do she dies,” Barker said. “I didn’t want anything to happen to Mary.”
In 1941 he moved to Philadelphia. Two years later, Eddie came to his senses and tried to win Mary back. But it was too late. When he visited on furlough, she shook his hand coolly and said it was nice to see him.
Later she wrote him that she was engaged to another man. She may only have been trying to let him down gently.
A decade after the 1945 death of her father, a supermarket manager, Mary moved to Dedham, Mass., with her younger sister and mother.
Mary stayed at Woolworth’s for the rest of her life, becoming the chain’s first female manager in the Northeast.
The three were private and inseparable, hunting for antiques, attending church, traveling to the Maine coast on weekends and wearing matching sheared beaver coats in winter.
There was no time for romance, and Mary never mentioned her breakup with Eddie to her family.
Mary died on Dec. 13, 1969, at age 53 of a cerebral hemorrhage.
She never married. By all accounts, she was happy. And she never knew Eddie broke her heart to spare her life.
“I have no regrets,” Barker said. “She was really too good for me. She deserved the best.”
Section of TWA cockpit located; ‘Critical’ step in investigation
By Pamela Ferdinand, and Fred Kaplan | August 3, 1996 for The Boston Globe
EAST MORICHES, N.Y.–In a critical step toward finding out what downed TWA Flight 800 more than two weeks ago, federal investigators yesterday confirmed they have located part of the cockpit.
It will take at least 24 hours for the section – the cockpit’s front windows and part of the interior – to be recovered and tested for traces of an explosive device. But smaller critical pieces of debris recovered yesterday from the same area already are at the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., undergoing forensic tests, officials said.
“It’s sort of the nerve center of the aircraft,” said Robert Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. “It’s the area you’re interested in being able to look at in any accident.”
With this discovery, analysts will soon be able to examine what remains of the plane’s controls and electronics. A huge chunk of plane found the day before contains the first-class section.
“If we are right, if the event was caused by something in the front of the aircraft,” said FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom, “hopefully, we’re going to see that, whether it was in the cargo or whether it was in the food carts or the first-class cabin.”
Investigators believe a bomb was set in the forward section of the aircraft because of radar signals and the way the debris scattered in the ocean. The recovery of the cockpit at the bottom of the debris pile is further evidence that the explosion sheared off the nose of the plane first, Francis said. All of the passengers and crew were killed.
A small chip from a food service cart removed from the body of a first-class passenger has further led investigators to believe the blast occurred in or near the cart because the smallest pieces of retrievable evidence are often nearest the blast – as in the case of Pan Am 103, which exploded in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
“Obviously, we want to know what it looks like in there,” Kallstrom said, referring to the cockpit. “We want to know what it looks like in the entire first-class cabin . . . and we want to look into those extra cargo containers.”
Galley items, such as a coffee maker with the coffee pot still in the maker, a burnt tray table and part of a cart have been recovered, along with tiny pieces of shrapnel from first-class passengers’ bodies and seats, said sources close to the investigation.
Carts used to serve first-class passengers are usually stowed in a galley located above the front cargo hold, and sources said investigators are focusing on how food service supplies were loaded onto the aircraft in New York. The TWA caterer at John F. Kennedy International Airport is Ogden, according to a high-ranking Port Authority source.
Airline food normally is sealed but it is not X-rayed before being loaded, according to a source close to the investigation. The carts are sometimes stored on the plane and sometimes loaded along with the food. Carts brought on board are not X-rayed, but they are stored in a secure location.
Because only 230 passengers were flying on Flight 800 the night of July 17, only a quarter of the plane’s available cargo space was filled – meaning that the bins containing luggage were probably pushed to the forward area. At least one cargo bin has been recovered.
Large pieces of the plane have been recovered in recent days, including a front section of the passenger cabin with 15 windows, a 40-foot portion of aluminum skin from the left wing, a section of fuselage from the right side, and a 15-foot part of the left with its flap assembly in place, sources said.
Investigators at the Grumman hangar in Calverton, N.Y., are trying to piece the plane together using blueprints and a passenger seating chart. But progress has been slow given the lengthy recovery process and the extent of damage, said one source familiar with the investigation.
NTSB investigators are looking at structural damage, including whether fractures show evidence of soot or fatigue, while FBI investigators are conducting preliminary forensic tests and passing bits and pieces of evidence, from fiberglass flooring to aluminum skin, to the Washington lab.
“Every piece that has been looked at has either breakup or impact damage on it, from the largest to the smallest piece,” the source said. “It’s incredible. Everything is deformed and twisted and bent.”
Meanwhile, some involved in the investigation are frustrated at the pace as it goes into its third weekend. No more victims were recovered yesterday, keeping the total found at 184, and seven divers have suffered decompression sickness since the underwater search began, officials said.
Francis said yesterday, “I would hope we’re still going to recover significant numbers of victims.” However, he added they would probably not find all of the rest.
A village transformed; Community extends itself as crisis center for crash;
By Pamela Ferdinand and Karen Avenoso | July 20, 1996 for The Boston Globe
EAST MORICHES, N.Y.–Roland Penney pulled three bodies out of the water and into a borrowed motorboat the night TWA Flight 800 exploded over the sea.
The next day, Ayne Privitera opened her seven-bedroom waterfront home to American Red Cross volunteers. And John Zlatniski donated more than two dozen loaves of homemade bread to the Coast Guard and threw in free coffee with breakfast.
“In a tragedy like this, you don’t think of a few dollars,” said Zlatniski, the 61-year-old owner of John’s Hometown Bakery and Deli. “You think, ‘How can I help?’ ”
The crash transformed East Moriches, a tiny coastal village of shingled houses and fishing docks into an international crisis center. The shock of 230 lives wiped out and the loss of a local couple have bound residents together in grief and purpose, whether it is staying away from the crash site as requested or providing the supplies that thousands of investigators, rescue workers and others need to do their jobs.
There are those who would rather that the hubbub end, their streets cleared of police and media trucks, their privacy and quiet restored. But many others instinctively perform small deeds to ease the way for strangers.
Just 20 minutes from the Hamptons, East Moriches and its neighbor Center Moriches belong to the township of Brookhaven. Together, they have 16,000 residents. Unlike the estates along Dune Road in the Hamptons, only one of the houses that ends at a harbor has a locked gate. Locals describe themselves as closer knit and more middle class than the denizens of the Hamptons.
Until two days ago, residents thought of their town as sleepy. It is too small to have its own town hall, and a duck farm occupies several of its acres. The main roadway has just two lanes.
“We’ve dealt with small plane crashes, a few skydiving accidents,” said Robert Miglino, 37, a minibus driver. “Nobody expected to see anything like this in their lifetimes.”
Miglino said townspeople will need a long time to recover from the trauma. Those who witnessed the crash or assisted rescue efforts have little time now for their own grief.
Eric and Virginia Holst, a Manorville couple in their early 30s who were en route to the wedding of Eric Holst’s brother in France, died in the crash. Eric Holst had a dental practice here, and Virginia Holst’s mother attends a local church.
Many residents say they are almost as stunned by the onslaught of outsiders as by the crash. Fifty Coast Guard workers arrived from Boston and Cape Cod alone.
“The night it happened, it was bumper-to-bumper traffic – ambulances, police cars, all of a sudden, hundreds of people you’ve never seen before,” said Roscoe Francis, a 50-year-old volunteer firefighter for Center Moriches. “It was like Sunday morning when church gets out.”
The instant transformation has meant that dozens of satellite dishes from TV stations now spike the horizon, and Curtis Sliwa of the Guardian Angels conducts radio broadcasts from the harbor. Camouflaged military vehicles and refrigerated trucks containing body bags drive through the center of town. Rabbis enter this enclave of clapboard Catholic and Episcopal churches to deal with the bodies of Jewish victims, who must be buried as soon as possible under religious law.
Heroic and kind gestures from townspeople abound.
For Penney, 61, a deckside dinner picnic turned into a grueling night of trying to save lives. Penney and his son recovered the bodies of one male and two female victims, and towed them to a Coast Guard boat.
“It hit us when we got back home and thought about our own loved ones,” Penney said. “Now I’m thinking about all the families who will never find their relatives.”
At the Center Moriches fire station, scores of volunteer firefighters and EMT’s worked 40 hours straight, bolstered by local gifts of homebaked brownies and cake. Most of them took time off from full-time jobs to be here; one female volunteer said she was suspended from her job for five days for choosing to help in the rescue effort.
Meanwhile, Boulevard Florists arranged to deliver bouquet after bouquet to the Coast Guard deck. One note from a Las Vegas sender accompanied white lilies and read: “God bless all of you. May the Lord keep you in the palm of His hand.” Emily DeGroot, owner of the florist shop said, “If they wanted us to help with the rescue effort, we would close the store and go.”
Even the media has been welcomed warmly by residents unaccustomed to the glare of publicity. The town’s softball field is now a press parking lot, and home plate is covered with tire tracks. A local minibus company shuttles reporters to the Coast Guard command post, and charges nothing. Deli owners send donations by bicycle, and a local youth group has offered to haul garbage and pass out sandwiches.
But not everyone around here is a good Samaritan or happy host.
Mike DiGirolamo, who owns a boat company, said he has willingly abided by police requests to restrict rentals. But now his business is hurting. Boats idle in the marina, and his shack is deserted save for the decorative life-size sharks. “What are you going to do? People lost their lives,” he said. “But it’s getting kind of old.”
At one house near the Coast Guard station, residents have posted a wooden sign on their lawn: “Please. No Parking. No Interviews. No phone access. Thank you.”
Others tried to make the best of a bad situation and capitalize on the crowds. For instance, the DiSario brothers, two East Moriches teen-agers, hawked pretzels and drinks to the crowds.
When one customer complained that bottled water prices had risen to $ 2 from $ 1 the day before, 13-year-old Mike DiSario explained that the bottles were now bigger. Still, with a shrug, he accepted $ 1.
“I figured he seemed nice,” DiSario said, “and you got to help people out.”
Empty seats, full hearts: Flight 800 victims missed at Pa. school
By Pamela Ferdinand | August 28, 1996 for The Boston Globe
Montoursville, Pa.–Summer Seese will always remember her first day of high school as the time she could not look into her classmates’ eyes.
If it was difficult finding a homeroom and locating her locker in strange surroundings, then it was twice as hard mustering the courage to speak to kids still grieving yesterday for their brothers and sisters who died in the July 17 crash of TWA Flight 800.
“I pretty much wanted to get it all behind me, but it was real hard to pay attention,” Seese said as she walked home at the end of the day. “I was kind of scared to say, ‘Hi.’ Before, they were just normal students.”
The return to school and the rituals of the season almost restore life’s usual pattern to this borough in the Allegheny hills, cushioned by green rollercoaster ridges. The community lost 21 of its 5,000 residents in the crash, but now the black bunting on “Welcome to Montoursville” signs and satin blue-and-gold ribbons of mourning are finally coming down.
Yet routine is a poor substitute for rebirth. Girls in training bras reflect on death, boys too young to drive are scared of flying, and mothers leave the dinner table to sob at a child’s grave. Not even teachers have been able to immerse themselves in timeworn back-to-school traditions: washing blackboards and arranging schedules.
On the advice of crisis counselors, they blacked out the names of 16 students from used high school textbooks and attendance rolls, yearbook files and library cards. But administrative sleight of hand could not shield 800 pairs of sorrowful eyes from the empty seats and unclaimed lockers of absent friends. French Club members and five chaperones died on their way to Paris.
“We’re way too young to have to worry about this,” said Dana Smith, a 14-year-old who lost a close friend in the crash and entered Montoursville High School yesterday as a freshman. “I don’t want to curl up in a hole, but I’m never going to forget them. I’m just not.”
The school was scrubbed clean by the time its doors opened yesterday. Gone were the wreaths and sheets of handwritten condolences that filled the school entranceway like a funeral parlor.
David Burns, a lanky tenth-grader with close-cropped brown hair, made a point of avoiding the stairwell where he used to meet his friend Rance Hettler before gym. Hettler, a star football player for the Montoursville Warriors at age 18, had planned to attend Northeastern University in Boston this year. His number will be retired.
“He took me into his group, and we all went out and stuff. He just made my freshman year really fun,” said Burns, 15, smiling as he recalled Saturday nights at Perkins restaurant with his friend.
As yellow buses drove up to the high school’s arched entranceway in morning fog, pairs of students stole away for cigarettes, swinging brand-new knapsacks on shoulders and wearing stiff, white sneakers that needed a good breaking in.
They said it was a quieter opening day than usual and depressing to think of the people who weren’t there, of the homerooms that would fall a student short. The last funeral took place only two weeks ago, and one girl’s body is still missing. The day passed smoothly, but no one knew what to say to comfort saddened peers. Or how to cope with their own loss.
“I like my life right now because I have a lot of friends,” said Nathan Tillson, a 15-year-old sophomore. “The hardest part is watching other people missing their best friends.”
Like the girl who left a letter sealed in plastic on 17-year-old Amanda Karschner’s grave. She tucked it between pink roses and a teddy bear with a flowery bowtie and, if it was a clear day, she would have seen the high school’s spire from a hilltop corner where most of the students are buried.
Shade trees and a monument are planned, but for now typewritten cards on short metal stakes mark plots open to the sky and graced with trinkets — from a plastic dinosaur and canister of Gap perfume to a bracelet of crescent moon and stars.
“I still can’t imagine that you won’t be sitting with us at lunch or I won’t have you to talk to in the morning or we won’t be in any of the same classes or we won’t be going to any of the football games together or you won’t be playing basketball or track or that we won’t have our senior year together or that we won’t graduate together,” Amanda’s friend wrote. “I know everyone dies for a reason, but I can’t figure this one out.”
Teachers, too, felt their way through the first seven hours of the school year, trying to master an unwieldy situation without appearing cold-hearted. At a private counseling session Monday, they learned to avoid inadvertently saying words like “crash” and “explosive” to discourage pained students from blaming all their social and academic problems on the tragedy, and to watch for signs of trauma.
Each year, news magazine covers line the top of the blackboard in teacher Donald King’s social studies classroom, but none will illustrate TWA’s story this fall. He taught most of the kids who died, knew all of them, and anticipated his class would wait for him to say something.
“I will picture exactly where the kids sat and that has always happened when I’ve lost kids, but this is a megathing,” King said. “I won’t waste any time — that’s the worst thing you can do. I’ll discuss it and allow them to say or write whatever they want. It will be businesslike, and it will be loving.”
Chuck Bowman, the school’s football coach, brought a sports psychologist from the Pittsburgh Steelers to talk to his team when practice began several weeks ago.
“Rather than trying to force a kid to do something, you’ve got to pat him on the back and say, ‘We’ve got to get our heads back on the game,’” Bowman said. “We’re not as concentrated as we have been in the past, but we had no summer and I think the kids realize that it’s time to move on.”
It was a rough year for Montoursville parents even before the July 17 crash. A school bus ran over and killed a 7-year-old as he crossed the road. Then a teen-ager died in a car accident, and another shot himself to death.
Parents here grew up together and know each other well. If anyone is unwilling or unable to move forward with the start of school, it is they. As Bill Geiser, who manages the town cemetery and knows all of the families, put it, “Hell can’t be worse than this. It just can’t be.”
Several who lost children are also sending a sister or brother to college for the first time, a letting go of a different sort just when they felt the need to hold on tighter than ever. Amanda Karschner’s mother watched a younger daughter leave yesterday for classes in Montoursville, even as Cellini’s Submarine House began to look for someone to fill Amanda’s job.
“Now the kids are going back to school, and the cemetery is where we come,” she wailed as she sat on a wooden bench at the foot of her daughter’s grave Sunday night. “Like good parents, we said, ‘Sure, you can go to Paris.’ How could you tell a straight-A student she couldn’t go? It’s the only time I should have said, ‘No.’”
Mass. Jury Finds Au Pair Guilty In Baby’s Death; English Teenager Faces Life For Second-Degree Murder
By Pamela Ferdinand | October 31, 1997 for The Washington Post
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–The English au pair accused of shaking a baby boy to death was found guilty of second-degree murder today by a Massachusetts jury, ending a three-week trial that transfixed observers on both sides of the Atlantic and evoked the fears of working parents everywhere.
A barely audible gasp of disbelief echoed in the stunned courtroom before Louise Woodward, 19, dissolved into sobs and crumpled in her seat. Susan Woodward, her hands shaking and her eyes rimmed with red, mouthed the word “unbelievable” to her husband, Gary, as their terrified daughter proclaimed her innocence.
“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything, Daddy,” the teenager wailed. “How could they do that to me? . . . I didn’t do anything.”
Defense attorneys huddled around the young woman from a small village outside Liverpool, England, smoothing her auburn hair and rubbing her back to quiet the sobs. Relatives and friends, who have said they believe the au pair was convicted in the news media even before the trial began in the 9-month-old’s death, appeared to be in shock and shed few tears as they left the courtroom.
Sunil and Deborah Eappen, baby Matthew Eappen’s parents, chose not to attend the verdict announcement. They watched the verdict on television. Family members and their supporters sat on the opposite side of the courtroom and showed no expression when the verdict was delivered shortly after 9:30 p.m., after nearly 25 hours of deliberations.
Woodward will remain in custody until her sentencing Friday morning. She faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years.
Defense lawyers were devastated by the verdict and said they plan to file a motion for the judge to reconsider the verdict and grant a new trial. “We are stunned by this verdict, mortified by this verdict,” defense lawyer Barry Scheck said tonight. “We will continue to fight.”
The trial, televised daily on Court TV, propelled the debate over working parents and child care into the national consciousness. The image of an inexperienced au pair allegedly shaking and then dropping a baby onto the floor painted a nightmarish scenario for working parents who entrust their children’s care to someone else and led to questions about whether the Eappens, both of whom are doctors, made wrong choices for their two sons.
Deborah Eappen, an ophthalmologist, works three days a week and received hate mail from people who argued she should have stayed at home; her husband, Sunil, is an anesthesiologist. Matthew died in his arms.
“I think there’s no doubt that what happened was not an accident,” Sunil Eappen said Wednesday night in a television interview with CBS’s Bryant Gumbel. “I can’t think about him more than a minute without breaking down.”
The case also generated doubts about the efficacy of the government-sponsored au pair program, which attracts thousands of young foreigners to the United States each year. Testimony in this most Irish of American cities polarized a local public wary of Woodward’s impassive demeanor and English viewers primed by O.J. Simpson’s televised trial and suspicious of the U.S. justice system. Cameras are banned from British courtrooms.
Earlier today, Woodward seemed calm and at times even cheery as she read letters from home. Her family refused to comment on the case, but their faces betrayed the strain of waiting for the verdict. The Eappens had not appeared in court since deliberations began several days ago, but their relatives and friends continued to congregate in an anteroom off Courtroom 12A wearing caterpillar-shaped lapel pins in honor of Matthew’s favorite toy, which played the song “You Are My Sunshine.”
To win a first-degree murder conviction against Woodward, prosecutors would have had to prove that the crime was committed with malice and forethought. The lesser charge of second-degree murder required proof only of malice.
Prosecutors tried to portray Woodward as a teenager with a visa to party and an “aspiring little actress” more interested in attending at least 20 performances of the Broadway musical “Rent” than in taking care of a colicky baby and his brother, who is now 3.
Middlesex Assistant District Attorney Gerard T. Leone contended that Woodward shook Matthew on the afternoon of Feb. 4 and then slammed his head against a hard surface to stop his incessant crying. Matthew lapsed into a coma and died five days later at Children’s Hospital in Boston as a result of a fractured skull and internal bleeding.
However, the defense team, paid for by EF Au Pair and led by former Simpson attorney Scheck, depicted Woodward as a young woman who balked at curfews and had broken house rules by talking on the phone more than five minutes each day but who was an innocent girl who loved children and would never do anything to harm her young charges.
When she testified, Woodward denied that she had forcibly shaken Matthew or thrown him to the ground out of frustration with his crying and her long working hours. She said Matthew frequently toppled over and may have struck his head when he stumbled near the steps of his play room a day before falling unconscious.
But Assistant District Attorney Martha Coakley said tonight there was no question that Matthew’s injuries had been inflicted and were no accident. Jurors had to sift through 116 exhibits and the statements of 37 witnesses ranging from neurosurgeons to forensic pathologists. They twice asked for excerpts from testimony that dealt with whether the baby’s head wound was old or new.
“The jury was able to see through the medical evidence that this child was harmed,” Coakley said. She added that Woodward had “maintained a denial of any kind of responsibility from the beginning.”
In Woodward’s home town of Elton, England, villagers who gathered in a pub at 3 a.m. to hear the verdict cried and screamed in disbelief.
“She’s incapable of an act of cruelty like that,” Hazel Mayamba-Kasongo told CNN. “This is unacceptable.”
“She was very quiet and very genuine,” Kate Hagan, 19 and Woodward’s best friend during their high school years, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. “She could not have done this.”
A similar case nearly two years ago in Loudoun County, Va., involving a Dutch au pair charged with shaking to death a newborn ended in a mistrial.
