Students Reflect on Crash of Flight 587

By Staff

LaGuardia students came together in a reflection/remembrance service for the victims who perished in the crash last month of American Airlines Flight 587. All 260 people on the plane headed for Santo Domingo, died when the plane fell out of the sky onto the Rockaway Queens neighborhood of Belle Harbor on Monday, November 12. 

“These are very sad times. We wanted to reach out to our students and our community as a whole,” said Irene Sosa, coordinator in the Student Life and Development Office who coordinated the event. 

Allen Scribner, a Student Life and Development colleague, echoed his understanding of the remembrance: “Everyday is not guaranteed to us. In the blink of an eye, we could all be in eternity,” noted Scribner. Linking the tragedies, the Flight 587 crash and the WTC attack, he said that, “Despite what you believe in or how you worship God, I think these events are telling us we need to stop and take inventory of ourselves. We also need to express our gratefulness to God for the blessings that are bestowed upon us and the pleasures that we enjoy.”
Greg Faulkner, coordinator, Center for Leadership, shared a sobering story about a LaGuardia student who had just dropped his family off at the airport for Flight 587. The student came to college and then received the painful news, between classes, of the plane crash. 

A student who attended the reflection service, but begged off on giving her name, said unfortunately she too had received a call at College that day and learned that her aunt had died in the crash.

Jeannette Castellanos summed up the feelings of many of the students when she delivered a prayer of appeal: “Lord help us and lead us to be sensitive to other people’s needs, to live a life of serving, to always be able to extend our hand to someone else, particularly all the families who lost someone, to be there for them. We know what pain feels like. Lord we ask forgiveness in this time when so many tragedies have happened.”

LaGuardia Live Wire is produced by the Office of  Marketing and Communications. Submissions are welcomed by e-mail at Livewire@lagcc.cuny.edu, by phone at extension 5060 or in person in room E-508.