How is this for fate?
The 18-year-old West Virginia Catholic school senior had been aboard the doomed flight to Coney Island on Saturday, but she got queasy and asked the pilot to take her back to the airport, her brother said yesterday.
The pilot turned around, dropped McCulley back at Linden Airport in New Jersey, then took off again with her friend's father and two classmates. The plane plummeted into the Coney Island sand a half-hour later, killing the pilot and all three passengers.
"She got air sick; she didn't want to fly," Brian McCulley, 19, said yesterday after speaking to his sister by phone. "It was a relief, but then complete disbelief. It's not nice to lose ... the girls. But I'm still glad my sister is alive."
Investigators are looking into a number of possible causes for the crash, including pilot error, mechanical problems and weather conditions, National Transportation Safety Board officials said yesterday at Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Field, where the wreckage is being examined.
The agency will issue a preliminary report of its findings Friday, but they may take up to a year to release a final report.
Coping with grief
Four hundred miles to the south in McMechen, W.Va., a town of 2,100 people just outside Wheeling, families and friends came together to cope with the death of two graduating seniors.
The dead are Joel-Beth Marie Gross, 18, a standout softball player and prom queen; honor student Danielle Block, 18; her father, Courtney Block, 38, and pilot Endrew Allen, 34, of south Jamaica, Queens.
Gross and Block were to have graduated tomorrow from tiny Bishop Donahue High School in McMechen. Those two, McCulley and another friend rounded out a close-knit group of classmates called "The Four Musketeers."
At the end of their sophomore year, all four went to southern West Virginia to help victims of Ohio River Valley floods and all played on the school softball team, despite a perennially losing record, teachers said.
On Sunday evening, Melissa McCulley returned home in a whipping rain and walked into the school, which has attracted mourners since the crash. She left without taking reporters' questions.
Throughout the weekend, students and residents filled the cafeteria at Bishop Donahue for a mix of traditional prayer services and modern therapy sessions.
"Nothing has ever happened like this in the history of the school," said religion teacher Loretta Metz, who wasn't surprised the girls would volunteer for a flight on a small plane in strange city.
"They were so full of joy, full of wonder, full of life," she said.
A father's pain
Robert, Gross, father of Joel-Beth, who had already lost his wife to cervical cancer, was taken to a hospital for treatment of shock upon hearing the news of his daughter's death, Brian McCulley said. Gross recovered to attend a Saturday memorial service in the building's cafeteria, but he sat quietly off to the side, absently listening to the consolatory words.
"It was really emotional. We knew he was hurting," said Brian McCulley, who graduated from Donahue last year. "It was just like he stayed to himself. He was with his son. They kept to themselves.
A pre-graduation celebration at the school tonight will go ahead as planned at the insistence of Block's mother, according to school principal, Brother Rene Roy. Counseling and prayer sessions will replace regular classes today.
Here are some images.
Dave
