Three Decades Later, Documentary Revisits PSA Jetliner Crash that Changed North Park Forever

Editor’s Note: Sept. 25, 2009, was a blazing hot day, the sky over North Park a bright blue and the air heavy and still, just as it was on that day 31 years ago. The corner of Dwight and Nile streets looked perfectly normal, like any urban neighborhood. There were no signs, no reminders of the airliner that came crashing down from the sky in that exact spot, raining fire and body parts, impacting the neighborhood and the lives of those who witnessed San Diego’s most horrific catastrophe. No sign that anything out of the ordinary had ever happened here — except the two bouquets of pastel-colored roses, wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with red ribbons, laid on the lawn outside the wrought-iron fence of the home on the intersection’s northwest corner. Someone remembered. — Leslie Wolf Branscomb

By Carl Larsen

Filmmaker David Fresina is hoping to bring a much-needed emotional release to San Diegans whose lives were forever altered by the crash of a Pacific Southwest Airlines jetliner and a small private plane over North Park in 1978.

It was a catastrophe that Fresina believes has never been dealt with in a public way. He hopes his film will help allow the city to confront and, with sensitivity, to express a grief that touched upon thousands of lives.

But it’s clear that the oft-used word “closure” is not what Fresina is trying to find. For those who lived through this tragedy, he says that can never happen. “No one should ever have to see what they saw,” he said in an interview.

The crash on the morning of Sept. 25 killed all aboard both planes and seven people on the ground. The death toll of 144 made it the worst disaster in U.S. aviation history at the time.

Fresina, who lives outside Boston, is working on the final edit of a one-hour documentary, entitled “Return to Dwight and Nile: The Story of PSA Flight 182.” He had hoped to have the film completed in time for this year’s anniversary of the crash but now expects to have its San Diego premiere in December, possibly at the North Park Theatre.

“I have waited 31 years…a little more time will not matter,” wrote Michael DuMonte on the Web site about the film, www.returntodwightandnile.com. “The more one learns about the events of that day and the stories behind them, the more one realizes just how profound and interconnected an event it was.”

Part of the film is posted on the Web site, showing compelling interviews with witnesses to the crash, fire fighters, surviving family members and TV newsman Jack White, who rushed to get the news on the air.

Fresina, 42, has had an abiding interest in the crash since he was a boy of 11. It was a story he remembered as he embarked upon a not-so-successful career writing screenplays, learning film production, and then as an assistant manager at a Home Depot store. He has completed several other short films. After he turned 40, he said, the compulsion to make the film grew stronger. “I knew I had to do this,” he said.

Outside of one local TV news documentary, and short news stories on anniversaries of the crash, Fresina said he was surprised to learn that so little had been done to chronicle the stories of those directly involved in the disaster.

Today, there are memorials to the crash victims outside the North Park Library, and in the Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park, but little else exists to memorialize the event.

Fresina began by posting interview requests in December 2007 on Craigslist, seeking those who were directly involved in the crash, and was surprised by the many replies. “For 30 years, it had been difficult for many people to talk about,” he said. Now, there was a flood of people wanting to let their stories be known, and to air their grief.

Beyond the frantic hours just after the crash, Fresina said the film will explore the enduring impact on the neighborhood and on those closest to the crash and those who lost loved ones.

Fresina came to San Diego last March and in September to research and film the story, using a locally hired production crew.

The movie preview includes an interview with a fireman who, knowing what he would find, questioned if he could continue in his career as he raced to the scene.

Another interview shows a mother and her son, recounting how they miraculously survived — she as the driver, he as a toddler — inside their car, which was wrecked by the crash. She displays a toddler’s outfit stained with blood.

And Hans Wendt, who was then a photographer for San Diego County, relates how he took the iconic photograph showing the PSA Boeing 727 racing toward the ground, its wing on fire. To this day, it remains among the most graphic, and gripping, photographs ever taken of an airplane on its way to disaster.

After conducting interviews last fall, Fresina said he hit a wall on how best to bring the film to completion. “How am I going to tell this story,” he asked himself.

He wondered for a while if graphic effects and other slick production add-ons were needed to show how the planes collided on a bright, sunny morning. But, looking at his hours of high-definition tape, he said he realized the best way was to let those he interviewed tell the story, and to use news footage shot by local TV stations.

After going to the crash site, Fresina said, “you’d never know this was the place where a plane crashed.” Still, he said he and others who assemble there annually find the location carries a hard-to-describe spiritual quality, similar to that many say they find at the 9/11 site in New York City.

Beyond its showing in San Diego, Fresina hopes the documentary will be shown at a film festival and on cable or public TV stations.

Some people, Fresina found, didn’t want to talk about the crash. “It’s a very sensitive subject,” he said.

But many others are supportive of his project, which he estimates will cost him under $30,000.

“They thought it had been forgotten,” he said.

Carl Larsen is a San Diego freelance writer who formerly was Home section editor of the Union-Tribune.