Families Mourn Victims, Scorn ValuJet on Crash Anniversary

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — As clergy members prayed in four languages to comfort relatives of the 110 people killed in the ValuJet crash a year ago Sunday, an anguished mother lashed out at the airline.

“My son died because of greed from people who have no respect for other people’s lives,” Carmen Roberts said. “Mother’s Day will never be the same.”

Roberts, who lost her 23-year-old son, Philmore Marks, in the crash of Flight 592, reflected the opinions of many of the relatives who feel that federal regulators and the airlines haven’t learned from the crash and are allowing planes to fly without smoke detectors and fire sprinklers.

About 175 people attended the hourlong service at First United Methodist Church here Sunday. Pictures of loved ones lined the front of the church, and a rainbow made of cotton balls and papier-mache decorated the arched hallway.

“The rainbow is a symbol of the diversity of expression of faiths, of language, of culture and of nationality,” the Rev. David Smith told the families.

On May 11, 1996, a fire in the front cargo hold brought down the ValuJet DC-9, killing everyone aboard.

The legacy of the crash has been a widespread effort to better regulate the airlines, but many of the suggestions for better fire-warning systems are still pending.

Sunday’s service followed a newspaper report that a Federal Aviation Administration official assigned to oversee ValuJet Airlines’ maintenance had falsified his job application and was unfamiliar with aircraft operations.

The revelation appears in a 122-page report by the Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General on the FAA’s supervision of ValuJet, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.

The inspector general’s investigation focused on the qualifications of FAA inspector David J. Harper, who oversaw ValuJet maintenance from September 1994 to last August, it said.

Harper’s phone number at his Big Canoe, Ga., home was unlisted, the Plain Dealer reported. Calls Sunday to David J. Harpers listed elsewhere in Georgia were wrong numbers or went unanswered.