Text size:

An afternoon shattered by tragedy

BY ERIK GERMAN | Newsday Staff Writer

11:29 PM EDT, October 11, 2006

The skies above East 72nd Street were heavy with clouds, as though someone had pinned gray sheets just above the buildings. James Trezza, 34, an art dealer, was on his way to Sotheby's to pick up a catalogue. Luc, Trezza's skittish Jack Russell terrier, was leashed and trotting alongside him.

The hum of traffic swallowed the faint noise from a distressed single-engine plane as it streaked toward 524 E. 72nd Street, a block and a half away, Trezza said. Faint, that is, until the aircraft slammed into the apartment building 31 stories above the street at 2:45 p.m.

"It sounded like a deceleration of something and then a smash, with glass shattering, steel and glass, and there was an explosion," Trezza said. A huge fireball ballooned from the point of impact, he said, followed by inky swirls of smoke.

The dog reacted first.

"Luc was taking off in the other direction," Trezza said.

Before the spooked terrier shot to the end of the leash, Trezza caught him. Almost at the same time, he said, shocked patrons from a nearby dry cleaner, drug store and pizza joint dashed into the street, all gazing up and east toward the fire.

The black smoke stained the building's brick front for nine floors above the point of impact. Ashes, metal and an L-shaped chunk of fiberglass fuselage rained onto the street below, witnesses said. Law enforcement officials said the driver's license of Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle, one of the plane's occupants, also fell among the burning fragments.

Nelson Franqui, 46, of Pelham in the Bronx, said he hurried north on First Avenue as soon as he heard the noise. "It was just a loud boom and smoke," he said. The maintenance technician said he also saw white smoke curling from debris that had fallen to the ground, scattered toward the west.

Large crowds quickly formed at the scene, with many in tears and others trying to reach their loved ones via cell phone. By 3:30 p.m., traffic was gridlocked as far as five blocks away. Scores of firefighters and police officers appeared on the scene, along with the heavily armed, Kevlar-clad police unit usually dispatched for terrorist threats.

By 4 p.m., rain was drenching the gathered crowds. Some gazed up at the dwindling flames with plastic bags atop their heads.

For many witnesses, echoes of the Sept. 11 terror attacks immediately sprang to mind, a worry that slowly uncoiled as the smaller scale of this accident became apparent.

"It was very scary. It was very reminiscent of the World Trade Center," said Myndie Friedman, director of graduate medical education at nearby NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

Staff writers Stacey Altherr, Luis Perez and Tami Luhby contributed to this story, which was supplemented with wire reports.