The Day They Died

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.”