The Day They Died

Who wakes up on a Wednesday morning and thinks, “This is the day that I die”? Unless we’re committing suicide or work in a coal mine, we get out of bed with all manner of preoccupations and concerns, but likely don’t give serious thought to, or think about at all, our chances of surviving the next twelve hours. We didn’t, at any rate, until August 1.

When he woke that warm summer morning, Peter Hausmann, a forty-seven-year-old husband and father of four, quite possibly thought about dinner that evening and the long, looping drive that would precede it. His wife, Helen, would be preparing a traditional meal for an acquaintance visiting from her native Kenya, and it would be Peter’s job, when he left work in New Brighton late that afternoon, to pick up their guest in St. Louis Park and bring him to the Hausmanns’ home in Rosemount—a slow, roundabout trip under the best of circumstances and definitely a slog at rush hour.

Distant Kenya could not have been far from Peter Hausmann’s mind that morning, if it ever was. Kenya, after all, was where he had gone twenty years earlier to “find himself,” as he’d told friends and family back home in South Dakota. One of his older brothers was a Catholic missionary in the East African nation, and, after he graduated from college, Peter, though trained for a career in computer technology, had gone there too. Peter wound up teaching at a Kenyan mission school, where he met and fell in love with Helen, another school employee. After they married, in 1990, they moved to the United States and eventually settled in the Twin Cities, but the couple returned to Africa as often as they could. Two days before he died, Peter and Helen had called her parents and tearfully told them that the Hausmann clan—all six of them—would not be visiting this year as they had hoped. There wasn’t enough money in the household budget. Maybe they could make the trip next year.

When Sherry Engebretsen left for work that morning from the Shoreview home she shared with her husband, Ron, their daughters, Anne and Jessica, and a golden retriever named Lady, it’s likely that one or more of the series of meetings that typically filled her work day would have been on her mind. Engebretsen, who was sixty, worked at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, where she was a “distribution strategies leader.” She had worked in the insurance industry her entire career—insurance was, her husband said later, “her passion” and something “she knew like the back of her hand.” In fact, she had many passions, including her family, her church, and her sleek, black Mercedes 280 SLK. She inherited a love of cars from her father, Ron would explain, and after years of driving the kind of practical cars you drive when you have small kids, she bought the two-door hardtop convertible—“her dream car,” in Ron’s words—a year and a half ago.

Perhaps the sheer pleasure Engebretsen took driving that car made the twenty-five- to forty-minute rush-hour commute from the northeast metro to downtown Minneapolis and back somewhat less of a stressful experience. Maybe it took her mind off the day’s inevitable meetings.

Patrick Holmes may have been thinking about the pain patients he’d be dealing with that day as an exercise therapist at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington. Maybe, while he was getting ready for work, he was concerned about his own left shoulder, which he’d separated playing baseball earlier in the year and which had required immobilizing his arm in a sling for much of the summer. Holmes was thirty-six years old. A baseball standout at Hill–Murray high school and Winona State University, he still loved the game and played, until this year, in a local men’s league. He also coached his son’s team and religiously followed the Twins, who that evening would be hosting Kansas City at the Metrodome not long after he passed it on his drive home to Mounds View.

According to his wife, Jennifer, a special education teacher in St. Paul, Patrick liked his work, colleagues, and patients, but hated the thirty- to forty-minute commute down and back along the metro’s twisted spine. He worked Monday through Thursday, ten hours a day. He would usually leave home at 6 a.m. in order to be at work by 7. August 1 would likely be a tedious, tiring commute like any other. He kissed Jennifer goodbye—the children, six-year-old Gavin and four-year-old Rena, were still sleeping—climbed into his twelve-year-old Saturn, and made his way toward the stream of southbound traffic.

Nothing we read in the paper or heard on the drive-time news during our own morning commutes would have led us to believe that this would be anything but an ordinary day in the Twin Cities. There was plenty of sunshine and, according to the forecast, another day with a high in the upper eighties was on the way, with the kind of sticky dew points that made us wonder what people did before cars were air-conditioned. A thunderstorm was possible in the evening.

It promised to be, in hoary newspaper parlance, a slow news day, if you didn’t count the latest Britney Spears silliness and Phil Spector’s murder trial in California. The most significant information of the morning involved, as it had nearly every day for the past four years, the war in Iraq and, a breaking development, the hospitalization of U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts following a seizure. Here at home, Boof Bonser would be starting that night for the Twins, who were struggling to stay above the .500 mark and still waiting for their second-half rally. Major road construction on Interstate–35W and the Crosstown on the south side of the metro area would make the commute, for tens of thousands of drivers, a slower than usual beginning and end of the work day.

But who, now nearly four months later, remembers what happened (or didn’t) on August 1 until a few minutes after 6 that evening? What most of us recall about that day begins when we first heard the news about “the bridge,” and our memories include the commonplace and otherwise unmemorable things we were doing the instant we heard it.

Most Twin Citians had crossed the I–35W Bridge countless times, yet it took a few moments for many of us to form a picture of it in our minds. Though it had performed an essential function near the center of the metro area since 1967—linking downtown Minneapolis and the West Bank of the University of Minnesota with southeast Minneapolis, the U of M’s East Bank, and the sprawling suburban and exurban reaches north and east of the city and, eventually, Duluth and the North Shore—it lacked the clear and immediately visualized aspect of the Stone Arch, Third Avenue, Lake Street, Wabasha, Ford, and Mendota Bridges, to name only a few of the familiar local spans. If someone mentioned the “I–35W bridge,” a reasonable response was, “Which one?”—because, until 6:05 p.m. on August 1, there were two major bridges and several highway overpasses along the busy stretch of interstate between Lino Lakes and Apple Valley on the north and south margins of the metro.

What, at suppertime on August 1, became the I–35W Bridge had been an inelegant and uninteresting slab of freeway between inelegant and (mostly) uninteresting Washington and University Avenues—a flat, nearly straight, 1,907-foot length of roadway, sixty-four feet above the Mississippi River at its center point, but crossing more flats, roads, tracks, and miscellaneous dry ground than water. Its eight traffic lanes had been squeezed down to a pair in each direction while workers employed by a Minnesota outfit called Progressive Contractors, Inc., repaired and resurfaced its deck. Though, afterward, there were rumors of a “swaying motion” and “unusual vibrations,” as well as more reliable reports of concern among bridge inspectors dating back a number of years, no one seemed to have been aware of anything that would make crossing the bridge at rush hour in the late summer of 2007 anything worse than a monotonous crawl.

Indeed, in the hours and days that passed after the collapse, one of the most unsettling questions was how such an ordinary structure could become such an extraordinary wreck. The pictures of broken concrete and mangled ironwork were war-zone and earthquake images we associate with other, more dangerous parts of the world. Even the dreaded tornadoes of which we’re reminded almost daily between late March and the end of September don’t seem to do this kind of damage, which still seems, in the videos and photos, almost supernaturally violent. The cars and vans and trucks flipped, battered, and flattened in the mess didn’t have a chance.

The fact that many more Minnesotans have perished in individual tornadoes, blizzards, floods, and fires over the years—and that, exactly two weeks later, thirty-six persons died in a bridge collapse in China—has done nothing to diminish our shock at what seemed to be the sheer randomness of the I–35W event. A bridge going down in Minnesota, with significant loss of life and property damage—and, by all credible accounts, without the involvement of a terrorist, saboteur, or drunken barge operator—simply seemed inconceivable and helps explain the news flashes, front-page headlines, and overnight appearances by marquee journalists from around the world. Somebody calculated the odds of dying in a bridge collapse as 100 million to one, which is 100 times greater than the odds of dying in a commercial plane crash. Our chances of being killed in a spin-out and collision while approaching, departing, or driving across a standing bridge are far worse than either.

Official explanations would have to wait for at least a year, we were told. Meantime, we could only shake our heads at the perverse improbability of the disaster and, per Minnesotans’ stoic tradition, remind ourselves that it could have been worse. Given the fact that more than 100 vehicles (including construction equipment) were on the span when its center buckled and the heavy sections both north and south gave way and fell, there could easily have been, according to authorities, 14, 40, or 140 dead. (More than 100 persons were believed to have been treated for injuries, ranging from scrapes and bruises to crippling trauma.) But the number of fatalities, though “only” thirteen (that infamously unlucky figure), seemed oddly yet indisputably larger than it was when we realized what a remarkable cross-section of our community it represented. So many parts of the local “demographic” circa 2007 seemed to have suffered a loss.

Their ages ranged from twenty-two months to sixty years. Seven were male, six were female. There were students, professional people, and what we used to call blue-collar workers. There were lifelong Twin Citians, foreign-born, and an undocumented immigrant. There were married men and women, fathers and mothers, singles, and divorcees. There were residents of the inner city, major suburbs, and towns on the periphery of the greater Twin Cities. Familiar northern European surnames—Hausmann, Engebretsen, and Holmes—shared the list of the dead with a Native American name, Blackhawk, and not-so-familiar names from around the world: Sacorafas (Greece), Sahal (Somalia), Chit (Cambodia), Trinidad–Mena (Mexico).

At 6:05 on August 1, they all shared the bridge.

That morning, Ron Engebretsen left the family’s Shoreview home at about 6:30—he works as a business consultant in Minneapolis—and Sherry followed him out the door an hour later. Sherry was working on a huge project—something about revamping Thrivent’s field offices and their products, Ron recalls—and this would be a typically busy, stressful day on the seventh floor of Thrivent’s Minneapolis headquarters.

“She was the hub of the wheel connecting all the parts to make sure the work got done,” says Harold Hegg, a colleague. “That day, she didn’t necessarily have more meetings than other days, but they started to overlap. Sherry was very driven, and she made everyone around her better, but in a kind, mentoring way. She had a great sense of humor. When things got tough, she would lighten it up.”

“Typical Sherry,” another colleague, Roger Arnold, says. “I had just returned from vacation, and she walks past my office and yells, ‘Make a decision, will you!’ She didn’t tell me what I should be making a decision about—she just kept walking.”

“She also knew how important it was to balance work and family,” Hegg says. “She was very dedicated to her girls and her husband. She always wanted to be there for them, even if that meant coming in early so she could get her work done and get home.”

Sherry and Ron spoke on the phone at about 4:45. It was, he recalls, a “normal end-of-the-day conversation.” Sherry sounded tired and eager to get home. Ron was just leaving his office and told her that he would start dinner—something simple, like BLTs. After dinner, the Engebretsens would take Anne, who was twenty and home for the summer after her sophomore year of college, to the bus station and see her off to dance camp in Milwaukee. Ron arrived at the house at about 5:30. At 5:39, Sherry called and told eighteen-year-old Jessica she was leaving for home.

At the Wolfe-Harris Center for Clinical Studies, a unit within Northwestern Health Sciences University in west Bloomington, Patrick Holmes was working on two federally funded studies involving spinal pain. “We did rehab with patients assigned to the studies,” says Sarah Zwagerman, who shared an office with Holmes for six years. “Pat would take them through mostly strength and flexibility exercises and then evaluate them for the study. He was also in charge of informed consent. He would spend a half-hour or forty-five minutes talking with each potential patient to see if they wanted to participate. He really liked his job and worked well with patients.” On August 1, she says, he saw five patients and took care of additional screening on the phone.

Holmes normally worked until 6 p.m. He didn’t that day, Zwagerman says, because he didn’t have a patient at 5. “So our boss told him, ‘Get out of here, go see your kids, this other stuff can wait.’ We knew Jenny [Holmes] played golf on Wednesdays, so our boss told him to go pick up his kids.” Zwagerman mentions the slow-and-go commute back up I–35W to Mounds View. “The day before we were joking about it,” she says. “I live in Bloomington and he was leaving for home before me, and I said I could stay at the office an extra forty-five minutes and still get home before he did.”

If the other persons who died at the bridge had done anything out of the ordinary that day, it has gone unreported. We do know that Julia Blackhawk, a thirty-two-year-old member of the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska, who resided in the southern exurb of Savage, was the divorced mother of two young sons and was studying cosmetology at the Aveda Institute on Central Avenue in Minneapolis. We know that Vera Peck, a divorced fifty-year-old St. Anthony woman who emigrated from Cambodia in the early 1980s, had plans to drop off her twenty-year-old son, Richard Chit, who was born with Down syndrome, at a daughter’s house and have dinner with a friend.

We learned that twenty-nine-year-old Scott Sathers of Blaine and his wife, Betsy, were planning to pick up a new car that evening, but that he would leave his desk in the enrollment office of Capella University in downtown Minneapolis forty minutes later than he usually did; that Artemio Trinidad–Mena was a twenty-nine-year-old husband and father from Mexico who drove a pickup truck as a sales rep for New York Plaza Produce in south Minneapolis; that Paul Eickstadt, who was fifty-one and lived in Mounds View (coincidentally, not far from the Holmeses, Engebretsens, and a cousin of Julia Blackhawk), had started work late that afternoon and, sitting high behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer full of baked goods belonging to the Illinois–based Sara Lee food corporation, pulled away from the company’s bakery in Roseville en route to a distribution center in Mason City, Iowa; that a pregnant, twenty-three-year-old, Somali nursing student named Sadiya Adam Sahal and her twenty-two-month-old daughter, Hana, were in a Toyota Highlander on their way to dinner.

We know that forty-five-year-old Christine Sacorafas Mosher (her first name was frequently reported as “Christina,” and, according to family and friends in the Twin Cities, “Mosher” was the name of the husband she was in the process of divorcing) was looking forward to teaching a children’s dance class that evening at St. Mary’s Greek Orthodox Church near Lake Calhoun; and that forty-five-year-old Greg Jolstad, who lived with his wife, Lisa, in Mora and loved to watch the Vikings with his buddies, had gone to work with the eighteen-person PCI construction crew resurfacing the roadway of the I–35W Bridge.

Sometime before 6, Blackhawk said goodbye to a girlfriend and left Aveda, heading in the direction of I–35W. Eickstadt, in his eighteen-wheeler, joined the procession of vehicles moving in a turgid stream toward the interstate’s Mississippi crossing.

Returning to her White Bear Lake apartment after work as a staffer at the 1st Choice Employment agency nearby, Sacorafas likely fed her chocolate lab, Cody, then, at 5:30, jumped into her white Suzuki RX7 and rushed off to teach her 6 o’clock dance class in south Minneapolis. A cousin, Leesa Dentinger, says Sacorafas got a kick out of driving her little SUV, which she’d bought in the spring to replace the Suzuki she had driven for a dozen years. She listened to Greek folk music (her grandparents had been born in Greece) or rock ’n’ roll CDs or KTIS Christian radio while she drove, her cousin says, and, having spent most of her adult life in Southern California, she wasn’t intimidated by Twin Cities traffic, even at rush hour and despite the fact that her younger sister had suffered permanent disability in a car crash twenty years earlier.

Today, though, she was running behind. On the intestate, the traffic was thick and slow, maybe thicker and slower than usual. The Twins game would start in about an hour and—everywhere, it seemed—there was construction and congestion. She realized she was going to be late.

A few minutes before 6, Christine Sacorafas called Rena Tsengas, a friend at St. Mary’s, on her cell phone. She told Tsengas she was on “the 35W” and stuck in traffic. When, a few minutes after 6, Leesa Dentinger heard the first news from the bridge, she called Sacorafas on her cell—“Christine’s life line,” says Dentinger—but her cousin’s phone was busy. Calling back moments later, Dentinger got Christine’s voice mail and said, “I heard about the bridge collapse and just wanted to know where you are and if you’re OK. Call me when you get this.” But five or ten minutes passed without a call-back, and Dentinger tried Sacorafas’s number again and this time, ominously, received a full-mailbox recording. “At that point, I knew something was wrong,” Dentinger says. “Christine never let her mailbox get full. And she would always call and let you know where she was.”

Sherry Engebretsen normally drove I–35W to and from work, but because of the construction delays she’d crossed the Tenth Avenue Bridge in and out of downtown Minneapolis for much of the summer. On the evening of August 1, however, she took the freeway bridge. Her husband says, “It was flat and you could see from one end to the other—you could see if traffic was moving. Evidently, it must have seemed to be moving, and that’s the route Sherry took on her way home. She knew we were waiting for her, so she’d looked for the fastest way.”

Peter Hausmann was a computer-security expert employed by Assurity River Group in north suburban New Brighton. Ordinarily, coming home, he simply reversed his morning route, leaving work between 5:30 and 6:30 and using Interstate 694 and 35E between New Brighton and Rosemount. Today, he’d leave work earlier and put an extra fifteen or so miles on the family’s Chrysler Town & Country. Shortly before 6, he called his wife from the van. Helen Hausmann says they talked for about five minutes, mostly discussing the evening’s menu.

“I told him I had the chicken and the rice out, but I needed him to pick up some kale at Rainbow,” Helen says. “He said he would, but he was in a traffic jam and couldn’t move. I told him to call me after he’d picked up our guest and I’d tell him what I needed at the store.”

“Is there anything else?” he asked her.

She was about to say, “No, just hurry home,” when the phone went dead.

“I said, ‘Peter, Peter,’ but there was only static.”

That was not the way the Hausmanns ended their telephone conversations. Peter had funny, fanciful nicknames for everyone in the family, and Helen says he would always conclude their calls with “See you later, Alligator” or “I love you, Mrs. Wiggins”—something he’d picked up from the old Carol Burnett TV show. This time, all she could hear was electronic noise. When Helen hung up and called his number, she says, “it rang and rang, and then I got his recorded message.”

She didn’t worry, though, until some time past 6, when Peter hadn’t called back. He would always call back if there was an interruption in their conversation. No matter where he was or how busy he might be, he’d be sure to call back and sign off with his usual lighthearted benediction. Then, at 6:30, when one of the Hausmann kids turned on WCCO–TV to watch Wheel of Fortune, there were the terrifying, mystifying pictures from the edge of downtown Minneapolis. Within minutes, the Hausmanns’ phone was ringing. Peter’s brothers, Jim and Leo, were calling from their homes in South Dakota. They had seen the bulletins on TV and wanted to know where Peter was.

When Peter hadn’t called by 6:45, Helen called a friend. She said, “I think Peter was on that bridge.”

Jennifer Holmes had a 6:08 p.m. tee time at Brightwood Hills golf course in New Brighton. “It was something Pat encouraged me to do—get out and golf with my friend,” she says. “The kids would stay with my friend’s husband and play with their kids for a half-hour or so, until Pat could pick them up. That day, we were about to tee off when a woman in the party next to us got a call. She told us what had happened to the bridge.” Jennifer called Patrick’s office and asked when he’d left work. She was told he had left earlier than usual, and she realized he could have been at or on the bridge. “I just had a feeling.”

Patrick Holmes didn’t carry a cell phone. The Holmeses had an extra one, and sometimes Jennifer would ask him to carry it, but he hadn’t taken it that day. (“If he had,” she says, “he probably would have stuck it in the glove compartment, turned off.”) But she knew he would have figured out a way to call her when he learned what had happened. “He’d been trained as a first responder, so I knew if he was at the bridge and able to, he would have been helping. But, by 7, I knew that if he were OK, he would have found a phone and called me.” Holmes, it turned out, was on the last northbound piece of the bridge that toppled onto the riverbank.

Greg Jolstad, reported to be operating a small loader at the moment of collapse, fell into the river. Paul Eickstadt’s co-workers, watching the horrific televised images, saw his truck—the long white trailer with the red Taystee oval on the side—on fire and seemingly wedged into the smoke-filled crevice where two concrete slabs on the south end of the bridge had come apart. Alongside the truck was the bright yellow school bus whose more than fifty young passengers—kids from a south Minneapolis community center on their way home from a day trip—had been saved from serious injury. Scott Sathers, running late in one of the freeway’s constricted northbound lanes, had moments earlier called his wife to say he was about to cross the bridge. Vera Peck and Sadiya Adam Sahal, each with a child in her vehicle, had also used their phones in the moments preceding the collapse, alerting acquaintances to a delay.

Peter Hausmann’s southbound Town & Country dropped into the river. His autopsy revealed a broken shoulder and fractured rib, possibly from debris falling on top of him. At least one witness reportedly saw Hausmann out of his van and reaching into another stricken vehicle in the water, attempting to rescue a child. Helen Hausmann hasn’t spoken to the witness, but has no doubt that the report about her husband is true. “That’s who he was,” she says softly.

It took almost three weeks to recover the bodies of all thirteen victims of the bridge collapse. Greg Jolstad, the lone construction worker to die in the disaster, was the last, his body finally located in the dark, debris-littered water not far, according to media reports, from where the bodies of several of the other victims had been found. His death was the result, the medical examiner determined, of multiple blunt-force injuries.

The causes of death were various. Sherry Engebretsen, Peter Hausmann, Vera Peck, and Richard Chit drowned. Julia Blackhawk, Artemio Trinidad–Mena, Scott Sathers, Paul Eickstadt, Christine Sacorafas, Sadiya Adam Sahal, and Hana Sahal, like Jolstad, died of blunt-force trauma. Patrick Holmes was the victim of what the medical examiner described as “mechanical and positional asphyxia.”

In the days following the collapse, public persons from the President and First Lady to the governor and the mayor and a stream of federal, state, and local authorities, clergy of all myths and persuasions, national news anchors, media pundits, academics, scientists, and philosophers weighed in with their condolences and considered opinions. Those with engineering expertise or access to it suggested a range of literal reasons why a steel and concrete bridge that had carried tens of thousands of vehicles every day for four decades—a structure whose primary practical disadvantage once seemed to be a propensity for black ice buildup in subzero weather—might suddenly and without apparent warning come apart like a B-movie disaster prop on a benign summer evening.

And beyond the labored attempts to explain the event in rational terms were acknowledgements of things bewildering and maybe inexplicable, as well as expressions of what had been irretrievably lost.

Hennepin County sheriff Rich Stanek described the bridge’s failure and its aftermath as “illogical and unthinkable.” Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos, speaking to Christine Sacorafas’s mourners, was quoted as saying, “There is no rationale for the event that took her from those who shared in her life.” As flummoxed as the rest of us, University of Minnesota president Robert Bruininks told The Minnesota Daily, “I’ve driven that stretch of highway for the last forty years, probably a thousand times. It never once crossed my mind that the bridge wouldn’t hold. . . . You assume you could die in a plane crash or on a highway, but you don’t assume that the basic structure holding you up when you travel is going to fail."

"Bridges aren’t supposed to break, Mommy,” first-grader Gavin Holmes told his mother after his father’s death.

“Bridges make me think—how can they not?” says Jennifer Holmes, who, like a lot of people, has been prey to a shiver of apprehension or fear or something when crossing a bridge. “A week before it happened, I was on the Lafayette Bridge [in St. Paul], and I thought it was such an icky bridge. Now when I go over it, I know it’s not going to fall—that would be too ironic, what are the chances—but still . . . .”

Jennifer Holmes does not know why the I–35W Bridge collapsed, only what was lost between the time when she and her husband woke up in the morning and when she could try to get some rest that night. “Maybe if he had left work later—who knows?” she says more than three months after the fact. Or maybe if he had reached the bridge a few minutes sooner and had safely crossed. “He was almost off, so close to getting off. You just have to trust there was a plan and that he’s in a better place.”

She pauses and then adds, “He was a great husband and a great dad—that’s the hardest thing. We had so many dreams, and now they’re gone. They don’t exist anymore.”

Erin Gulden is an associate editor and William Swanson is a senior editor at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.