The Day They Died

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.”