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Death rides the ferry into St. George
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October 16, 2003
I saw death yesterday.
Bodies made small, reduced, diminished by the leave-taking of the soul that gives heft to the shell that houses, fills the spaces between bone and flesh, vein and tendon.
The dead need nothing from the living; what is offered is done as a talisman, a testament to the leave-taking.
I looked down from a ramp at the St. George Ferry Terminal and saw bodies, the city's official covering offered as a final gesture of respect, a show of anonymous dignity to those who no longer cared about such things...a shroud, more for us than for them.
There is no such thing as a good death or dying well. Such beliefs are romantic Hollywoodized pabulum. Death is ugly in its impersonality; it is a solitary, personal experience. It is the aftermath of dying that presents a set of problems to be solved by the living, who even in their grieving silently say a prayer -- "there but for the grace of God, go I."
In this business over these many years I have seen the results of misguided passion, the anger that forces a finger to pull a trigger, fists used as clubs. I have seen death, smelled it, had its stench ghost through the cloth weave of my coat. But yesterday it was the sight of death that had finally murdered my last remaining vestiges of innocence.
They were coming home to dinner smells and children's giggles; to loving embraces, to parents and wives and husbands, perhaps just to eager pets.
They boarded the ferryboat believing that the mundane, the everyday, was forever and a day. And then the tenuous thread that tethered their spirits was cut, sent corkscrewing, then lifted on the wind to a place of ... what? -- nothingness for non-believers, glory for those of us who hold tight to the hope that life really never ends, but ascends.
VIVID PICTURES
To do my job takes dispassionate observation, and in that respect I am like the cop from the 120th Precinct who was one of the first on the scene. The wind had sandpapered his cheeks the color of mangos. He stood looking out at the water turned icy gray blue, his earth-colored hair being lifted by wind fingers playing through its thickness.
"I helped take one guy out of the water...he was alive. They took him on to St. Vincent's. The call came in just 40 minutes ago from a cop onboard. She was yelling, 'Need a bus forthwith! Need a bus forthwith!' A bus is what we call an ambulance. We are going to need a lot of buses."
"The whole side of the slip collapsed, you can see it out there. The boat looks like a sardine can ripped open. I saw four bodies, all crushed. This is the worst thing I've seen in my career."
He shook himself, as if by doing so the picture of what he had seen would go out of focus, be made less vivid.
Watching the heroic cop, I knew those pictures -- for me, and I fear, for him or Stephanie Nazario of New Brighton, who survived the crash unscathed -- will never be far enough out of focus.
"I was on the ramp, just about to go inside when it happened. I didn't get inside in time," the young mother told me. "Everyone started running, so I held onto to this railing. I heard the screams...I will always hear those screams I think, and the crying, especially this one older woman who couldn't seem to catch her breath."
It could have been worse, they say. Fast action by those waiting in the St. George terminal probably saved lives. Capt. Gerry Damora of the Staten Island Rapid Transit Police, stationed inside the terminal in the first half-hour after the crash, told me that everyone moved out quickly and cooperated. But his seasoned demeanor seemed to crack when a man came running down the ramp screaming that he couldn't find his wife.
I don't know if he did or if she was one of the fatalities.
'I AM ALIVE'
Nailah Harris, 29, as she walked off the gutted ferry boat, made life-changing decisions -- survivors of tragedies so often do. Facing down death makes facing life squarely a welcomed challenge. "My priorities are going to be reordered. This changes everything," the Todt Hill resident told me.
"I was coming back from a job interview. I was in the front, on the top so I could see exactly what was about to happen. We were going full force, full speed. It sounded like, I don't know, a bulldozer hitting a wall.
"People were screaming and just running, a mass of screaming and crying people running blindly. Then we were dead in the water and everything got quiet, and then the screams started again. Those people sitting down never had any warning, didn't have a clue. I am alive."
Norman James, a Navy man stationed in Norfolk, Va., on leave, was barely able to contain his fear that death had claimed his girlfriend and three young cousins. As minutes ticked toward an hour, his anger boiled over.
"I'm in the armed services, trained to handle emergencies, and they won't give me any information. I can't just sit down and wait for word, I've got to do something."
James walked -- stomped really -- away in the direction of a group of emergency personnel. Later, I saw him. His girlfriend was safe, but there was still no word on his young cousins who attend school in Manhattan and were on the ferry. The 23-year-old Westervelt Avenue resident said he was going to call Norfolk and ask for an extension on his leave.
"I'm going home and hug my son," said Stephanie Nazario as she passed me running to catch a bus. "That's all that is important to me right now. My stomach is in knots."
Life becomes a butterfly wing, fragile and transparent in the fading candlelight that is death. And that transparency acts as a mirror into which we cast furtive glances at our own mortality. Reflected back is the truth about our vulnerability and the uncomfortable, discomforting reality that the thread is just that...not a sturdy rope, but a hair-thin line.
Stevie Lacy-Pendleton is the deputy Editorial Page editor and an Advance senior news columnist. She may be reached at lacy@siadvance.com.
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Please send donations to the victims of this tragedy directly to:
The Ferry Fund -- call Borough Hall at (718) 816-2000 or D'Amato's law office at (718) 442-0900.
Your contribution is very needed by those that did not have insurance.
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There are 10 confirmed dead in the Staten Island Ferry accident. The victims, according to the New York Police Department, are:
Joseph Bagarozza, 35, of Staten Island
Pio Canini, 52, of Staten Island
Vincent Ferrante Jr., 26, of Staten Island
John Healy, 44, of Middletown, N.J.
Darius Marshall, 25, of Staten Island
Guillermo Paguay, 44, of Woodside, Queens
Louis Alexander Robinson, 50, of Staten Island
Frank Sullivan, 46, of Middletown, N.J.
John Valinski, 40, of Staten Island
Carmen Huertas, 42, of Staten Island
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Condolences may be sent to Staten Island Borrough Hall
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Lest We Forget
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