He had grown increasingly annoyed with USAir. The airline seemed to be backing away from its promises to pay some of his expenses. His family coordinator from the airline would not tell him who was sitting beside Joan. He knew she was in Seat 14E, but he wanted to know who was beside her when she died.
A week later, Brett drove to Hopewell Township to look for the missing diamond and to bury a gold brooch on the hill. The NTSB had finished its work there, and the Hopewell police were allowing family members to visit as long as they had an escort. Brett had arranged for Major Robert Pfeiffer of the Salvation Army to accompany him. He had met Pfeiffer when he visited Pittsburgh the weekend after Joan was killed. The night of the crash Pfeiffer had arrived on the hill very quickly, when the wreckage was still smoldering.
On this day they met in the parking lot at Green Garden Plaza and then proceeded up a driveway that led to the crash site. As they walked through the woods, Brett asked how it had looked immediately after the crash. Pfeiffer described the scene and the odd way some things were not damaged, such as an intact briefcase that was near others that had been shredded. As they walked through the trees toward the road, a boy came up to them.
“Hey, mister!” the boy said to Brett. “Wanna piece of the plane?” The boy was carrying slivers of aluminum.
“Goddamn NTSB,” Brett muttered under his breath. Didn’t they collect everything? How could they leave evidence behind? The wreckage was supposed to be safely inside a hangar somewhere. How could they solve the mystery if they didn’t have all the puzzle pieces?
Brett stood there for a minute, trying to make sense of it all and then finally said sure, he’d take a piece. He looked around and found lots more. One was the size of his forearm. He walked down the road to the area where the nose had hit and knelt in the dirt. He was saying a quiet prayer when a woman tapped him on the shoulder.
“Your wife was on the flight?” the woman asked.
“Her name was Joan,” said Brett.
The woman started crying. “My husband was…”
They hugged. The woman said she was Tina Connolly and that her husband was Robert Connolly, a financial consultant who was returning from a business meeting in Chicago. Brett explained that he had been trying to find out who sat beside Joan. Tina said she had been trying to find out the same thing—who had been sitting with her husband.
“Do you know where Joan sat?” she asked.
“Sure. Fourteen-E.”
Her eyes widened and her chin quivered. She called to the man with her, who was her brother-in-law, and asked, “Do you remember where Bob sat?”
He shouted back, “Fourteen-F.”
It took Brett a second to realize what that meant.
They stood there, staring at each other in amazement. Brett handed her a card about the scholarship fund he had set up in Joan’s honor. The card had Joan’s photograph on it. “Do you have a photo of your husband?” he asked.
“No,” she said. She pointed to her brother-in-law. “But this is his identical twin.”
They talked for forty-five minutes, discussing their experiences since the crash and plotting how they could compile a seating chart by talking with other families. Finally Tina left and Brett returned to bury the brooch.
Deciding to leave Brett alone, Pfeiffer climbed up an embankment to a wreath of silk roses. There were 132 roses on the wreath, each one tagged with a passenger’s name.
Brett knelt in the dirt. He had not brought anything to dig with, and there were no sticks around, so he pulled out the piece of wreckage the kid had given him and used it to dig a little hole. He set the gold brooch inside and covered it up. He said a prayer and watched his tears fall to the dirt.
Just as Pfeiffer got to the wreath, a small gust of wind blew one of the roses to the ground.
He bent to pick it up and looked at the name on the tag: Joan Van Bortel.
Pfeiffer came down to the road and handed the rose to Brett.
“Brett, it’s a sign from God.”
Brett filled his pockets with the wreckage of Flight 427, with squares of aluminum and a big bolt with a serial number on the side. There was so much debris that he could have filled a pickup truck. He took it back to his home in Illinois because he wanted proof that the NTSB had left evidence behind.
He had read in Newsweek that some crashes had been solved by evidence as tiny as a filament in a lightbulb. If that was the case, why didn’t the NTSB take every piece? He called the Newsweek reporter who had written the story and described what he had found. The magazine ran a brief item about his findings in its Periscope section on November 7,1994. The magazine quoted Brett as saying, “It’s not like we had to excavate. The pieces were lying at our feet.” An unnamed NTSB spokesperson was quoted as saying that investigators “took everything that was usable. We knew we were going to leave some pieces behind but we don’t think they’re of any consequence—what’s left is for souvenir hunters.” That infuriated Brett. Souvenir hunters?! Why would anyone want a piece of an airplane in which 132 people were killed?
A few days later, Mike Benson of the NTSB public affairs office called Brett and tried to explain further. Benson said the wreckage was left because investigators were getting a repetitive pattern. The smaller pieces were of no significance. Benson did ask him to send the bolt, however. But a few weeks later, Brett got a letter from the NTSB saying the bolt was of no consequence.
Brett had gone years without crying, but he was now breaking down every day. He went days without laughing. He thought it was strange, how he had always taken laughing for granted. But there was nothing in his life that was the least bit amusing. His first good laugh finally came when he noticed that Joan had left the price tag on the crystal frame he had taken to Pittsburgh. That was typical of her. She didn’t worry about the small stuff.
It took several weeks to tell the bureaucracy that Joan had died. He found that the government, Joan’s employer, Azko Nobel, and the credit card companies were sympathetic, but it was still painful to tell the story again and again. He increased his running. It was just about the only thing that provided any relief. He could put his mind on hold and focus on the pain in his legs instead of the one in his heart. He drove to the forest preserve where he and Joan had often hiked, and he ran sprints up and down Mount Trashmore. He put hundreds of miles on his mountain bike, riding a long trail that connected several nature preserves. He wore Joan’s engagement ring on a chain around his neck now. It hurt sometimes when he rolled over in bed and the little prongs that had held the missing diamond dug into his chest, but Brett did not want to repair it. He wanted the ring left exactly as they had found it at the crash site.
Life felt meaningless to Brett, so he quit his job. He spent his days reading books about death and grief. He also visited the tiny Lisle library to read articles about the Flight 427 investigation, the FAA, and aviation safety. He learned that the FAA had a dual mandate—to regulate and promote aviation—simultaneously. What a conflict of interest! Critics said that the agency had a “tombstone mentality” and did not act until people had died.
His bitterness against USAir grew. He felt that the airline had been unresponsive to his requests about the Flight 427 seating chart. It wasn’t until he and Tina Connolly had started compiling names that the airline decided to tell families who had been sitting beside their loved ones. He was also mad that the airline had reneged on some of its offers to pay for a church contribution and to fly friends and relatives to Joan’s memorial service. The more he read about USAir’s safety record, the more he disliked the company. The Pittsburgh crash was the airline’s fifth fatal accident in five years. The FAA had beefed up its inspections of the company a couple of weeks before the Pittsburgh crash because of the other accidents. If Joan had known that, he doubted she would have flown USAir.