One year after a corporate jet fell out of the sky over Ellet, killing all nine souls aboard, it’s not easy to tell where the plane came down.
Two fresh fall-colored bouquets mark the spot, placed by a grieving father of one of the victims as the anniversary of the tragedy approached.
But grass is growing over the land where the aircraft took out a small brick apartment building whose inhabitants were, mercifully, all somewhere else at 2:53 p.m. on Nov. 10, 2015.
The roadside memorial has dwindled to a couple of faded flags, some dirty plastic flowers and a battered foam cross.
And for folks who have lived most of their lives beneath the Akron Fulton Airport approach, the passing planes have once again faded to background noise, said Bob Hoch, who represents the neighborhood on the Akron City Council.
Still, like ripples in a pond, waves remain after the rock has sunk below the surface.
Those who lived or worked immediately around the crash site say they are not the same.
Ashley Wagner still can’t lay her head on her pillow without thinking of the strangers who lost their lives just a few yards on the other side of her bedroom window.
Jay White said in the moments after watching the plane’s descent from between living room blinds, he was forced to confront his own mortality and the limits of courage.
The mechanics at Gary’s Car Care, who believe the plane missed their building by the length of a wing, admit they instinctively pause and hold their breath each time a plane sounds a little too low or a little too loud.
And Jessica Clark still feels anxiety over the explosion that sent her to her knees, although the tragedy also brought a special relationship into her life.
Lost souls remembered
Ashley Wagner was at Summit Mall when her cellphone rang. A friend started describing a plane crash, fire, smoke and general chaos that seemed to be happening right about where her apartment was located.
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Wagner rushed home, only to be stopped a couple of blocks short of her destination by a police officer. After he learned where she lived, he shook his head and directed her to American Red Cross representatives at nearby Davenport Park.
It would be another five hours before Wagner learned the accident had actually occurred two doors down from where she lived.
When she was finally able to return to her home, she exiled herself from her bedroom for seven months because its window faced the crash site.
“God rest these souls lost in the Akron plane crash,” she wrote on Facebook the day after the accident. “I’m having a hard time with the fact that those who passed are so close to me right now, and their families are probably very far away. I hope they find comfort in this moment somehow, someway.”
One family did.
Social media can carry messages far and fast, and her heartfelt prayer found its way to the sister and mother of Nick Weaver. Nick was among the seven employees of Florida real estate developer Pebb Enterprises killed in the plane that was chartered to take them to potential investment sites throughout the Midwest. Akron was to be their last stop before returning home.
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Weaver’s loved ones called Wagner, finding some peace in the connection, and they’ve remained friends. They sent Wagner a picture of a cross of Weaver’s found in the wreckage; she sent them a picture of the sky the day after the accident, swirls of blue and pink that seemed symbolic.
They talked again a couple of weeks ago, after a National Transportation Safety Board hearing found pilot error as the probable cause of the crash. Wagner, 30, strolled over to the embankment to pay her respects again. She came home with a palm-size piece of twisted metal.
“I still think of them all the time,” she said of the victims. “It’s still so crazy that nine people lost their lives right outside my bedroom window. I’ll never get over that.”
Too close to home
Jay White was ready to be a hero.
He had returned home from a job interview and was sitting on the couch when the sound of a screaming plane sent him running to the front window. He watched in horror as a plane bore into a four-unit apartment building three lots away.
He jumped into action.
“I ran over there. I think I was the first one there. I wanted to be a superhero and do what I could, do what was right,” White said.
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He saw the remains of the plane, the smoke from the fire not yet thick enough to conceal it. It had crashed into an embankment, stopping the plane from skidding into more homes and confining most of the wreckage to a small area.
“About this size,” White said, waving a hand over a long polished bar at the Park, the neighborhood Ellet tavern where locals sometimes end their day.
A wall of intense heat stopped his progress, then he noticed the power lines, torn from their poles, snapping and crackling on the ground.
“I went from superhero to the scaredest person in the world,” he said. “That has a lasting effect on you, to put yourself in a life-or-death situation and realize you’re not tough enough for this. I learned where my line was that day.”
White backed up from the scene, then decided if there was nothing to be done about the plane’s victims, he could at least make sure his neighbors were out of their homes. He ran between apartment units, knocking on doors.
He moved out of his apartment as soon as he was able: “I decided I couldn’t live under the approach anymore.”
The mostly empty buildings on either side of the crash site are now up for sale, and White suspects a lot of turnover among the other small apartment buildings lining Mogadore Road.
Eyes to the skies
A large plane recently sailed over the roof at Gary’s Car Care.
“Damn, that son of a bitch is low,” one of the mechanics muttered.
That’s how things are here now. Men who once paid no attention to the steel birds flying overhead now occasionally pull their heads from beneath raised hoods to reassure themselves that some particularly loud plane is staying aloft.
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“I never experienced anything like that,” said mechanic Tim Smith, recalling the plane that didn’t make it.
Smith believes the shop was spared only because the plane was tilted dramatically to one side as it passed the side of the building. He said it was a near-miss that motivated him to do some heavy drinking that night.
As soon as investigators removed the yellow tape from the accident scene last fall, shop owner Gary Smith put together a 6-foot-tall wood cross, painted white, with the names and ages of all the victims.
It stood at the site for several months until the property owner put the lot up for sale and asked it to be removed.
The cross is stored in the garage now, though the memories linger.
Co-worker James Pector said he notices the hum of aircraft when before, the sound barely seemed to exist at all.
“Every time a plane comes by now,” Pector said, “we have a tendency to look up.”
Accidental friendship
In the days following the tragedy, the stories of the people who lived in the destroyed apartment building started making headlines. That’s because all three tenants would have been home on any other given afternoon.
Their excuses for being away when the plane hit — a sudden bout of insomnia for a night-shift nurse, another resident’s yearning for Hot Pockets, a midday wings-and-beer date between mother and son — seemed so unlikely, people started crediting divine intervention.
Here’s another “what if”: Jessica Clark was preparing to leave her apartment, trash in hand, when she dropped the bag onto her porch and went to the bathroom to touch up her hair. And that’s where she was when the plane crashed into the building directly next door, taking out the dumpster where she would have been standing.
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“When it crashed, I hit the ground,” she said. In some ways, she’s still fighting to stand back up. A grandmother who raised her had died just weeks earlier, a grief that escalated into night terrors after the plane accident.
Clark, 23, lives in Akron’s North Hill neighborhood now, deliberately far from the route planes take to reach Akron Fulton.
But the tragedy brought a new and important relationship into her life.
She met Keri Stevens, the owner of Pizza Pan, when the local eatery took up a collection to help people who had been displaced by the accident.
Clark had gone to Pizza Pan to help with the effort. Generous donors were dropping off everything from furniture and clothes to cash. The two women bonded instantly.
“I would stop in after I got off work and hang out here, especially on Friday nights,” Clark said. She’d play with Stevens’ kids, or they’d just talk about their lives. One such conversation revealed that Clark’s grandmother died on the same day as Stevens’ brother, uniting them in yet another way.
Today, Clark and her younger sister, Samantha, both work at Pizza Pan.
“We got a family out of this,” Stevens said. “They’re truly family now.”
'Hot Pocket guy' haunted
Jason Bartley is a bit haunted by the idea that he cheated death.
He was on his way home from running errands and would have been inside his apartment at the time of the crash if he hadn’t suddenly got a hankering for Hot Pockets. He veered into a Dollar General store parking lot, a last-minute decision that kept him out of harm’s way.
That night, safe at a friend’s house but without any personal belongings to his name, his emotions swung from being grateful to be alive to wanting to cry.
There have been times he wondered if fate was going to catch up.
“Was it my time to go? Sometimes I’m doing something and my mind goes, ‘Are you supposed to be doing something else right now?’ ’’ he said.
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Bartley still lives in Ellet, a mile from his old apartment. The support he received here as he rebuilt his life made him want to stay.
“I really liked the way Ellet treated me,” the Norton native said. “Basically, most of what I have now came from the people here.”
His furniture. His TV. The clothes on his back. Even the new outlook he has on life.
“They showed me how people really are — that society really cares,” he said.
Ellet even gave him a new name. He’s widely known as “the Hot Pocket guy.”
People have sung him the Hot Pocket jingle. And one day as he left Dollar General, a man in a car was waiting. He recognized Bartley from media reports, and he wanted to see if he was coming out of the store with a Hot Pocket.
Bartley, 39, laughed. Yes, Hot Pockets are still on his list of favorite foods.
“Cheaper than fast food,” he said.
And, ultimately, a healthy choice.
Take a look back at our coverage of the Ellet plane crash and its aftermath.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.