The Day They Died

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.