Ex-Daily Herald reporter can't ignore, or forget, human toll of Flight 191

A young journalism graduate from the University of Wisconsin, Paul Marcotte barely began his 3 p.m. to midnight shift as a cop reporter for the Daily Herald when his Motorola two-way radio squawked to life in his car.

"It was a beautiful day, clear skies, sunny," remembers Marcotte, who was driving west on Touhy Avenue in Elk Grove Village on that May 25, 1979. "They said there was a plane crash at O'Hare. I remember turning back to look at the airport and you could see it. It was big, almost like a volcano. The flames shooting up. The ominous black smoke."

He drove toward the carnage.

"I was excited," Marcotte said. "I was a young reporter and this was a big story. I was motivated by not screwing this up. There was pressure to do it right."

As he neared the crash scene, he saw a long caravan of emergency vehicles and fire chief cars.

"I was driving a red Nova and I had my Herald media pass," Marcotte says. "They were going 70 miles an hour and I just brought up the end of the line. They waved the caravan of emergency vehicles through and I just followed them."

He parked along the side of the road, walked through some high grass and came upon the scene. He passed somber firefighters wandering the same ground.

"I remember asking if there were survivors, and the firefighters just shaking their head no," Marcotte says. "There were a few images from that day that I'll never forget."

The lush, green grass, was littered with bits of plane, papers, luggage and death.

"I believe the explosion of the aircraft was so tremendous that it threw debris quite a distance in all directions. I saw pieces of flesh...," Marcotte says. "For some reason, it didn't even register."

A suitcase had opened to reveal a student's college papers from the University of Wisconsin. Marcotte picked up a sheet and looked at the work of a person whose parents still were blissfully unaware of their loss.

"There was an instant reaction looking at this paper because I went to school there, and then I felt like I was violating somebody's privacy and I put it back," Marcotte says.

He kept walking the field, not even sure what he was looking for.

"I saw a whole arm, severed at the shoulder, I don't know if it was a man's or a woman's, with the palm up," Marcotte says. "At that point I decided, 'I don't need to keep going in that direction. I've seen enough.' I saw these things and said, 'This is just ghoulish. I don't need this to write a story. I need to talk to people.'"

He made his way toward the buildings where two workers on the ground had been killed and others injured.

"It was confusing, chaotic," Marcotte says. "I recall two guys explaining how they escaped from a nearby business that was on fire by driving a truck through the building."

He took notes, writing down quotes and names, feeding some information through his radio to reporters back in the newsroom.

He walked to the nearby mobile homes.

"There were big, gaping holes in those buildings," Marcotte says. "I recall some of the trailers having been ripped apart by parts of the exploding aircraft, and part of the plane on the ground."

When he finally walked back through the crash site to get to his car, Marcotte saw where evidence technicians had marked every remnant of the crash.

"There were hundreds of these little yellow flags all over the place," he says. He had no desire to see what those flags were marking.

"There was a real sense of unreality to the horror of the experience," Marcotte says. "I recall feeling very numb and dazed by the experience to the point when I got back to the Herald wondering whether I could write anything about it."

Back in the bustling newsroom full of life, reporters were phoning relatives of the victims, FAA officials and aviation experts. Marcotte sat at his desk, typed up notes for other reporters, and abandoned an attempt at writing a first-person story "because I didn't think I could do it justice." Instead, he wrote a story on deadline about the people he had interviewed at the scene.

"I do remember it being difficult trying to concentrate and write," he says. "I remember those images flashing back to me."

Even today, his voice cracks as he recalls memories he has tried to forget.

"I got teary-eyed last night just thinking about that student," says Marcotte, a husband and father of three, whose oldest daughter is a college student. "Those families, they had such loss."

He remembers "the tangle of fire hoses that seemed to extend for miles" and "the long line of ambulances that seemed to stretch for blocks with paramedics and other medical personnel standing by the ambulances because there was no one to help."

In an instant, 273 lives had ended and thousands more had changed forever.

"When I left there I was trying to make sense of it, find some meaning in it," says Marcotte, who had no luck. "I recall being in a bit of a daze after walking around the crash site, and having difficulty sleeping for days afterward."

That weekend, Marcotte found himself spending a day alone in a movie theater.

"I don't really watch horror movies. But I sat through 'Alien' and 'Dawn of the Dead.' I went by myself," Marcotte says. "I don't know what that was all about."

Marcotte left the police beat to be an education reporter and then left the newspaper field to become a lawyer. In addition to his private law practice, Marcotte, a 54-year-old Elmhurst resident, serves as a consultant for a legal show called "Inside Justice" on WYYC-TV20.

"I enjoyed the police beat. It was kind of fun. I liked hanging out with the cops. I had a pretty good relationship with most of the police," Marcotte says.

But May 25, 1979, still haunts him 30 years later.

"It would be nice," Marcotte says, "to get some of these images out of my head."

<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Photo Galleries</h2> <ul class="gallery"> <li><a href="/story/?id=294827">Images from the Flight 191 crash </a></li> </ul> <h2>Video</h2> <ul class="video"> <li><a href="/multimedia/?category=9&type=video&item=354">Former Daily Herald reporter Paul Marcotte on Flight 191 crash</a></li> <li><a href="/multimedia/?category=9&type=video&item=353">Former Daily Herald photographer Dave Tonge on Flight 191 crash</a></li> </ul> <h2>Stories</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=295460">Merv Griffin gig, bad cold, kept writer off doomed jet <span class="date">[5/25/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=295841">Editorial: Flight 191 victims deserve a marker <span class="date">[5/25/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=295469">Devastating crash at O'Hare 30 years ago leaves legacy of safety <span class="date">[05/24/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=295468">Flight 191, an ill-fated number <span class="date">[05/24/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=295190">30 years later, no memorial marker for Flight 191 <span class="date">[05/21/09]</span></a></li> <li><a href="/story/?id=295190">Now a pilot, he was in high school when he saw 191's smoke plume <span class="date">[05/24/09]</span></a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div> Now a pilot, he was in high school when he saw 191's smoke plume