What: F/A-18 Military Jet from the carrier Abraham Lincoln landing at Marine Corps Air Station Miramir
Where: San Diego neighborhood
When: DEC 8, 2008
Who: Young Mi Yoon, 36; her daughters Grace, 15 months, and Rachel, 2 months; and her mother, Suk Im Kim, 60.
Why: A witness said the plane was chugging along with what seemed like one engine. Then…”roar of engine and all of a sudden, woop, dead silence.”

In George’s Point of View

Dead Silence. The rogue jet flattened a house, silenced four lives, and stole the joy from the lifetime of tomorrows of Don Yoon (who lost his wife, daughters and mother-in-law), Jun Hwa Lee (who lost his mother, sister and nieces), Sanghyun Lee (who lost his wife, daughter and grandchildren.) Maybe it’s a cheap trick to keep repeating Young Mi, Grace, Rachel and Suk Im Kim in multiple incarnations, but like all of us, they were composed of all the hats they wore, and their lives touched a lot of people; and I don’t regret the repetition. I’m wishing I knew the names of poor Young Mi’s two siblings, so I could repeat the relationships twice more. How better to express that those four lives lost are ever so much more than we can define?

Where there had once been plans of a Korean family wedding, the joy of cousins, reunion of generations, and decades of Christmases like the one just past, for Don Yoon and his in-laws, there’s now only pain, and following that, an immeasurable vacuum. I guess there’s no point on my dwelling on how great the loss, or the irony. Don Yoon came to the US at 18 to build a better life, and one minute before that jet crashed, he had the American dream.

I guess you could say it went from dream to nightmare. The three years since that crash have ended with the U.S. District Court in San Diego awarding the surviving family members $17.8 million. I don’t need to be a gambler to know that they would trade every penny to have their family back.

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