Good evening, 919 Gang.
GINA LUBRANO writes:
She was supposed to get her carpet cleaned on Sept. 25, 1978. Instead, my neighbor and dear friend, Karen Borzewski, was among 144 people who perished when PSA Flight 182 went down in North Park.
I had worked the late shift in the Union newsroom and was fast asleep that morning when something woke me around 9 a.m. Seconds later, my phone rang. It was Joan Stewart, secretary to managing editor J.D. Alexander. Where's Karen," she asked. "Flying," I replied.
From my bedroom, I could hear knocking on Karen's front door. The men said they were there to clean her carpet. "She works for PSA," I called to them, "and there's been an accident." They turned and left.
Then the nightmare began in earnest. I learned later that Carol Casey's mother had been on the phone when part of the plane crashed into her duplex. It was not only Karen I knew who was on the flight. She and her best friend, Debbie McCarthy, always bid the same schedules. I remember talking to Karen's stunned and grieving parents in Illinois who had had a phone call and were making arrangements to come to California. Karen was very much loved by my family. My sister, Angie, flew to San Diego on PSA to stay with me, and while I worked, she went with the Borzewskis as they attended services for those killed in the crash.
That night, when I went to the office, I wrote a piece about Karen that ran in the next day's Union.
It was a truly awful time. So much sorrow, so much pain. Multiply that 144 times. Forty-five years later, it is still staggering.
San Diego was a much smaller town in those days. Chances are if you lived in San Diego, someone you knew suffered a loss in that crash.
After more than four decades, the details are blurred in my mind. But, one thing I remember clearly is going to the coroner's office to claim a diamond ring that Karen had worn. I went with another friend of Karen's, and was talking to the coroner David Stark's secretary, whom I knew as a voice on the phone on past calls for information from the coroner. At one point, I saw that Karen's friend, Dorothy, was staring at a blackboard. When I followed her gaze, I saw the blackboard listed the body parts that were used to identify some of the victims. I almost yelled at her: "You don't need to see that, Dorothy."
I took Karen's ring home with me and tried to clean the soot from it before giving it to her parents. Try as I might, I couldn't get it all off. I never told them how much I had tried to clean it up.
Fast forward to sometime later and I was working another plane crash, cold calling phone numbers of people with the names of San Diegans who had been killed. I reached one man and asked if he knew the person who shared his name.
"My son," he said.
I held it together until I hung up. Then, I lost it.
REBER: Great piece, Gina. Thank you. You reminded me of an incident on one of those days when you were on vacation and I was substituting doing corrections.
A man called to complain about a one graf AP story about a California Highway Patrolman who had died from a blast from his own shotgun while alone in his CHP car.
The called complained that the story made it appear the office had committed suicide when it actually was an accident. I explained that it wasn’t our story, it was an AP story about something that happened hundreds of miles from us and we didn’t really have a basis to correct the story.
The man choked up, and in a hoarse voice he said “That was my son.”
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REBER: There was quite a fuss a few weeks ago about Kansas officers searching the home of the editor of the Marion County Record. They seized computers, files, everything they could find. The raid was stressful to the editor’s 98-year-old mother, who died the next day.
The police chief who led that raid has been suspended.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/police-chief-led-raid-small-203049960.html
