Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 21

i I Sfsca Bgpsar i tragedy I j0 mim hr OF FLIGHT 4 -a I I Normal takeoff LJW I 1000 feet above he to seconds 1 OF RIGHT 255 yl Right 255, en route to Phoenix with 147 passengers and six crew J'fK As? members, took off about 8:45 p.m. Sunday from Runway 3 Center r77 Seconds after it became airborne it appeared to lose power to its left fJJf I engine. Some witnesses reported fire on the left wing. Avis car rental yw Tf0m J5f5' One of the jet's two engines I F-'i'JPSr'- wds found on the grass between eastbound and JlzZ I westbound lanes of I-94. Wf fir'-:" The forward part of the 1 '-'Vjv fuselage, including the cockpit f-" a(j I and what appeared to be the Wpto0 Losing altitude and rocking, the jet hit a runway light, clipped if I nose wheels, came to rest on VAvd the roof of an Avis car rental building and slid north along -t' ueons northbound Middlebelt Road, Middlebelt Road.

Memrnan I Crash north of westbound The jet slid under a railroad trestle and both 1-94 overpasses, site I Farther north was the wreck showering the area with flaming debris. Ralroad of a four-wheel-drive vehicle in Dozen of bodies and burning pieces of debris were scattered which two people were killed. A just south of 1-94. Wreckage from the burning jet was found a scattered over a one-mile path. -r i 7 7 "0 Godda'fr fQ.

't0' Extension Rogell Runw Nightmare descended soon after farewells til A Phoenix on a case. He also planned to visit his daughter at Arizona State. ft i McLaughlin, 29, who moved to Arizona after graduation from Novi High School, had brought his fiancee, Gina Tawzer, back to the Detroit area to meet members of his family of eight sisters and four brothers. The family has been beset by tragedy this year. In May, McLaughlin's brother-in-law, Aloysius Korte, was shot to death in a case of mistaken identity in Northville.

Korte was married to McLaughlin's sister, Fredericka. In June, the trailer home of McLaughlin's mother, Mary Joan McLaughlin, was destroyed by a tornado that ripped through Novi. Thomas Anderson, 35, owner of the Scottsdale nightclub where McLaughlin had worked three or four nights a week for the last 2' years, said McLaughlin asked if it would be an imposition to take the two-week trip. "I told him we'd do fine," said Anderson. "I look back and tell myself, God, I should have told him to stay." Louis Tallarico arrived at Metro at 3 a.m.

Monday with his son's girlfriend, 22-year-old Shelly Snow. At 7 a.m., they were still waiting, looking devastated and numb, in the Northwest terminal. Tallarico's 24-year-old son, Patrick, of Lansing, had boarded the flight with high-school buddy Tom Barbario, 25, also of Lansing. Saturday on company business, said his mother-in-law, who asked not to be identified. A supervising engineer at GM's Tech Center, he stayed busy away from work with golf, coaching his youngest son Brent's baseball team, and serving as an usher at Sunday mass at St.

Jane Francis de ChantelCatholic Church in Sterling Heights. He drove himself to the airport in a company car. Hidi Ratliff, 16, of Santa Ana, was on vacation and had just finished working two summer jobs in North-wood, Ohio. She was returning home to start cheerleading practice at Costa Mesa High School, a school official said. Her parents, Mary Ann and Orville Ratliff, first realized she might be dead when they saw the TV news Sunday.

Then an airline representative called, and they took the red-eye from Los Angeles to Detroit. Hidi, their only child, would have turned 17 on Sept. 4. Kurt Dobronski, 28, a football star from Central Michigan University and Dearborn's Edsel Ford High School, was heading back to Scottsdale, where he was vice-president of a construction company. He was back in Michigan to serve as By PATRICIA CHARGOT and J.

MITCHELL Free Press Stiff Writers Larry and Laura Thorell and their baby daughter, Krista, were back home in Michigan celebrating the traditional milestones of family life: Kris-la's first birthday, her baptism, the retirement of Laura's father. No one expected any final fare-'wells. But shortly after Laura's parents propped them at Metro Airport and they boarded Northwest Flight 255 for their new home in Arizona, Laura, Larry and Krista were dead victims of the worst aviation disaster in Michigan history. "I just hope they're happy," said Jennifer Moy, Laura's 19-year-old "I'm glad they went together. This 'is the first time anyone close to me has 'died.

I know I just have to be strong." Patrick Gleason, 49, a GM engineer Utica, was among a group of Motors employes on a business trip to GM's Desert Proving Ground in Mesa, Ariz. He drove himself to the lairport. His wife and sons were home television when news of the xrash flashed across the screen. His 'son, Chris, 25, also a GM employe, left the airport. After consulting with Northwest officials, he drove to his parents' home and returned Monday morning, this time with his father's aentai records.

"He was well liked by everybody," Chris Gleason said of his father as he stood clutching the dental records at the Northwest terminal Monday. "He walked on water as far as his coworkers were concerned. I'm a GM myself and when I'd tell people my name, they'd say, 'Oh, you're Pat's WRENCHING SCENES unfolded as word of the crash spread by radio, 1 television and telephone. 1 Joan Gizowski of Canton Township lost her brother, Matihew McLaughlin, a real estate broker, in the crash. "Jim Tuck was was totally devoted to the causes of his clients and his clients were people to whom some wrong had been done," said law partner Bill Goodman.

"He would fight with all of his strength and heart to remedy it. He fought for the small people, he fought for the people who were not powerful people." The tragedy came no easier to the friends and relatives of crew members. Bruce Elfering, 23, and Michael Kahle, 34, were roommates and fellow flight attendants. Their day began with a flight from Minneapolis to Detroit, continued on to Saginaw, then back to Detroit. They were looking forward to Flight 255's final destination of Orange County, where they had planned to rent a car with other crew members and head south to Newport Beach.

John Rynerson, 26, who roomed with Elfering and Kahle, said he learned of the crash as he came off a flight from Phoenix in Minneapolis Sunday evening. "I was coming off the plane and another flight attendant said there'd been a crash," he said. "She just said the flight number and I knew it was them." Roberta Rademacher, 35, of Eagan, a Northwest flight attendant since February 1981, leaves her husband, C. Michael, and a 13-month-old daughter, Shay Elizabeth. Rademacher grew up in St.

Paul and she and her husband were to celebrate their 13th wedding anniversary Saturday. Her husband "sort of wanted her to get out" of flight attendant work. "I just worried about her a lot." But he said: "She loved to fly. If she could go to a different place everyday, she'd be happy. But she also loved to be at home, especially with the new baby." Also contributing were Free Press staff writers Bill Laitner, Patricia Montemurri, Brenda J.

Gilchrist, Za-chare Ball, W. Kim HeronS Bill McGraw and Jocelyne Zablit. If JN. 'V 1 PATRICIA BECKDetrolt Free Press at Metro Airport, as Melissa Daft, a relative leaving on Northwest picnic for employes of William Beaumont Hospital in Troy, where she works as a part-time secretary. He came home and packed for Arizona, where he was going to be until next best man at a friend's wedding.

While home, he went with his grandmother, Helen Shotey of Dearborn, to that community's annual homecoming gathering, where he visited with old friends from high school. "It was kind of neat," said his sister, Lisa. "It was the best visit he had had since he moved to Arizona." After his parents dropped Kurt off at the airport Sunday night, they drove over to watch his brother, Karl, pfay softball. When word of the crash came, Lisa headed out to the airport. "He was a fantastic guy," she said Monday, "a standout personality whom everybody absolutely loved and adored." James Tuck, a 44-year-old Detroit lawyer and father of two, was flying to BARBARIO WOULD have been a senior at Arizona State University this year, and the two friends had planned to vacation for a couple of weeks before school started.

Snow said she and Patrick Tallarico would have been married one day. "Besides the loss, I feel he was cheated out of life," she said Monday, struggling against tears. "He had a lot of goals and things he wanted to do. He had a lot of dreams, you know." Cathie Corona, a mother of three and a nursery school teacher from St. Clair Shores, didn't usually go off on trips without the rest of the family.

But she had planned a trip to California to visit her sister. Her husband, Richard, dropped her off at the airport. It was business as usual Monday night left, of Lansing, and a friend see off Flight 255. He heard about the crash on the car radio driving home, turned around and drove bag.k to Metro. Mathews had spent Sunday with his wife, Cynthia, at a.