Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [111]
Sometimes we need heroes so badly that we embellish them—often with no harm done, as in Littleton. But other times the quest for a hero can get ugly. It can become a vehicle for all sorts of other ambitions. After Air Florida passenger Joe Stiley was fished out of the Potomac, he woke up in a hospital bed with severe injuries. A hospital spokesperson appeared and told him he had some visitors, he says. Next thing he knew, a phalanx of ravenous reporters had surrounded him with microphones and cameras. They needed a hero by deadline. Then the bedside phone rang. The hospital operator said his mother was on the line. “OK, put her through,” Stiley said through his haze. It was a newspaper reporter. He thought there had been some kind of mistake, until it happened again—with another reporter.
Peel open the history of any disaster aftermath and you will find a second, third, and fourth strata of heartbreak. Over the years, Skutnik, the other Flight 90 hero—who received dozens of awards and a standing ovation at the State of the Union address—became increasingly embittered by his interactions with reporters, Hollywood producers, and even the woman he had rescued, according to multiple news stories. “What I’ve found out is this: If you do something like that for people, they are not always as grateful as you’d think,” he told the Washington Times in 1992. (Skutnik declined to be interviewed for this book unless he was paid for doing so. For more on why I did not pay him or anyone interviewed for this book, see the endnotes for this chapter.)
Disasters often bring out the worst in people, right after they bring out the best. Emergency vehicles frequently have problems getting to plane crashes because so many locals have piled into their cars to see the wreckage. At the scene, police have to be diverted just to control the spectators. Everyone wants to see a disaster site, sometimes to help but often for more complicated reasons.
Immediately after the attacks of 9/11, David Jersey, a homeless man, volunteered to search for victims in the smoking ruins of the Trade Center. He claimed at one point that he had heard the voices of survivors. Firefighters stopped what they were doing and conducted an anxious search. They found no one. When I interviewed him a year later, Jersey denied he had done anything wrong and insisted that he had heard voices. “He had no evil motive,” said his attorney Brad Sage. “I think for the first time in his life he was part of something.” But New York City juries showed little mercy in those days. He was convicted of reckless endangerment and sentenced to five years in prison.
Two days after the attacks, Sugeil Mejia, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, told police that her husband was a Port Authority police officer who was trapped under the rubble of the Trade Center. He had just called her on his cell phone, she said. A police officer drove her down to Ground Zero while she appeared to take two more calls from her husband.
Rescue workers searched for the man, risking their lives in precarious rubble. Then Mejia disappeared. Officials checked the badge number she’d given for her husband and found no match. Four months later, when Mejia pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment in Manhattan Supreme Court, she wept openly. She was sentenced to three years in prison.
Israeli psychologist Hanoch Yerushalmi believes that most of us have “fantasies” about what we will do in a disaster. Some of us take them further than others. One of Yerushalmi’s clients, a college student, was at a Jerusalem café when it was blown up by a suicide bomber, and although he was not hurt himself, he did help some of