Diana Suriel woke early Tuesday and headed down to breakfast at the Cincinnatian, an upscale hotel in one of the Queen City’s historic downtown buildings.
It was the second day of a whirlwind business trip that had already taken her to four states — she’d be going home after a final afternoon visit to Akron — but it didn’t stop her from pausing to appreciate small delights.
The new mother’s favorite photographic subject, 15-month-old Gianna, was half a continent away, so she turned her camera on her meal. She uploaded the image of a breakfast sandwich artfully topped with fried eggs and a drizzle of cheese to Instagram at 7:46 a.m.
“A fantastic panini to start the day,” she wrote.
Suriel, 32, was six months into a new job with Pebb Enterprises, a Boca Raton, Fla., real estate investor and developer.
As project manager assistant, she was accompanying two executives and four other employees on a chartered plane that was whisking them from city to city. They were looking for distressed plazas and tired commercial sites in need of rescue.
Pebb was flush with cash after some recent sales, but the market was too hot in their home state so they decided to follow a trail of opportunity through Midwest regions where the company had already put down roots.
At sunrise Monday, they had boarded a 10-seat Raytheon Hawker twin-engine jet in Fort Lauderdale, which took them to potential projects in Minnesota, Illinois and Missouri.
All that remained on Tuesday’s itinerary were three Ohio cities. After breakfast and morning business in Cincinnati, the staff made a short hop to Dayton.
Then at 2:13 p.m., the Hawker took to the sky and turned toward Akron.
Jared Weiner had made the trip before.
Last year, he and other company executives scouted the Shoppes of Chapel Hill, a plaza they eventually bought and added to other Ohio holdings that included shopping centers in Bainbridge Township, Dayton and Cincinnati.
Weiner, 35, had a talent for spotting properties not reaching their potential, and his reputation as the company’s head of development was growing after hitting a few home runs.
The business was in his blood.
He and brother Ian were managing principals at Pebb, a company co-owned by their father, Bruce Weiner, and founded by their grandfather, Paul Weiner, 42 years ago.
When the patriarch — a Brooklyn native active in Jewish circles from Canada to Israel — died in September, he was celebrated as much for his philanthropy as his business acumen.
He also stressed the importance of family, and in 2010, Jared started one of his own. He married Amanda Filipek, the daughter of a prominent Pittsburgh attorney, and soon became dad to son, Jonah, and daughter, Zoe.
The definition of family extended to another man on the plane.
Ori Rom, who joined the firm 18 months ago to manage its assets, married Jared’s sister, Laurel. Their dreamy wedding in Naples, Fla., made the pages of Modern Luxury Brides.
Rom, 32, had pursued her for years before she caved in to a date. He planned to propose to her when he lured her to a villa lit with candles and filled with flowers, but she started screaming “Yes!” before he could get the words out.
They honeymooned in Tanzania. On Tuesday, their first wedding anniversary was just 12 days away.
People often remarked on Rom’s dashing good looks, but he was even more admired by tenants for being accessible. A couple of weeks earlier, a Cuyahoga Falls store owner in the Shoppes of Chapel Hill called Rom’s cellphone on a weekend morning to report a maintenance problem. Rom suspended his leisure pursuits, promptly handling the issue occurring 1,200 miles away.
Weiner and Rom had brought along other talent on their excursion, a team filled with millennials, mostly new hires riding high in their careers with young families at home.
Gary Shapiro, who joined Pebb in October as director of leasing, was known for his sense of humor and ever-present smile, a guy who worked hard but never took himself too seriously.
The 35-year-old became a dad for the second time two months ago. Waiting for Shapiro’s return was little Abigail, 3-year-old Sammie, and Shapiro’s wife, Corey.
The company was also counting on the critical eye of Thomas Virgin, director of construction.
Everyone called the 31-year-old “TJ” — except for Victoria, born in July, who will call him daddy when she finds her voice.
He and wife Andrea announced #babyvirgin on social media last December by posting an ultrasound and a photo of their two dogs wearing “Big Brother” and “Big Sister” T-shirts.
The company’s newest hire, Nick Weaver, joined Pebb just eight days earlier. An expert in Midwest real estate, he left another real estate firm owned by the family of his wife, Robin, to collaborate on Pebb’s expansion.
But in New Hartford, N.Y., the 34-year-old was revered for another set of skills. As team captain, he led his high school hockey team to the state championship in 1997.
Rounding out the passenger list was Diane Smoot, director of property accounting. Smoot, 50, was mom to 21-year-old twins, one a son currently serving in Guam with the U.S. Air Force.
Smoot was no stranger to Ohio. She traveled to the state a couple of times this year already to visit her ailing mother.
Still, this business trip was so special, she called her sisters to share the excitement of being on her first jaunt with company executives.
As the Pebb staff relaxed for the half-hour flight to Akron, Andres Chavez and Renato Marchese occupied the cockpit.
Chavez, a 39-year-old Colombia native, and Marchese, 50, had compiled more than 10,000 hours of flight experience between them, most recently working for private charter company Execuflight in Fort Lauderdale.
The other thing they had in common was both had a son at home.
As the pilots steered the Hawker through Ohio airspace, clouds thickened.
Visibility that was at least 10 miles in Dayton shrunk to 1.5 foggy miles as the plane crossed into Summit County, the pilots relying on instruments.
Akron Fulton International Airport didn’t have a staffed control tower, so the Cleveland Air Traffic Control Center offered guidance.
Chavez and Marchese were cleared to begin their approach to Runway 25.
Ellet in view
Two miles from the airport, Ellet came into view beneath the plane’s wings. The tree-studded residential area on Akron’s east side is filled with single family homes, small apartment complexes and a scattering of businesses.
A cold mist blanketed the landscape and dampened a routine, midday lull. Buses were dropping off schoolchildren, who quickly scurried inside out of the chilly drizzle. Many residents were still away at work, an hour when they were beginning to watch the clock and contemplate dinner plans.
Living near an airport, residents here are accustomed to planes flying over their roofs, the hum of engines fading to background noise.
But on Tuesday afternoon, several of them sensed something was wrong.
Nicholas Pastorius was on his bike headed for a home on Mogadore Road when he looked up.
This plane is too low, he thought.
Hannah McCune exited her car after pulling into her Bilburston Road driveway and noticed a troubling sound.
This plane is too loud, she thought.
Minda Burton was sitting in her car at a body shop on Mogadore Road when motion drew her attention. She watched the tail of the Hawker fly overhead.
This plane is too close, she thought.
Then the jet hit a power line.
Roberta Porter put on her brakes. She was on her way home to Pauline Avenue and shouldn’t have been at that spot at that moment, but she’d missed her turn.
Suddenly, 50 feet from her, a plane plummeted from the sky. It steeply banked left. A wing hit the ground and the fuselage tore through a four-unit apartment building. It exploded.
Porter fumbled for her phone to dial 911. She thought about the families who may have been living in the building and prayed for the souls on the plane who so obviously perished in the fireball right before her eyes.
At 2:53 p.m., the phones at the Akron Police Department started to ring. And ring.
“There’s a huge fire …”
“There’s some sort of explosion on Mogadore Road …”
“The power’s out …”
“I thought I heard a plane go down …”
A Stull Avenue resident, voice shaking, frantically tried to explain what she was seeing — “fire everywhere, black smoke” — when a dispatcher who had already fielded several calls reassured her.
“We’ve got the whole world coming to you,” he said.
Neighbors made their way to the site, many of them still clueless as to what had just caused the ground to shake, their furniture to jump, the photos on their walls to vibrate.
Dennis McCune worried something terrible had befallen the guys who operate the machine shop next door. He’d run from his house to check on them when he saw a trail of people running up the road.
He followed them to the conflagration. He saw no evidence of a plane, the fire so large and intense it concealed its victims.
Within moments, new sounds and sights flooded the Ellet neighborhood.
Advancing sirens drew nearer.
Flashing blue and red lights cut through the dreary afternoon.
Hot Pocket run
Jason Bartley woke up Wednesday morning in his mother’s home after an evening of wide-ranging emotions. Being thankful. Wanting to cry. Feeling luckier than anyone has a right to be.
His own bed — along with everything else he owned — was incinerated hours earlier.
Breakfast was a humble Hot Pocket that saved his life.
Bartley, a 38-year-old factory worker, lived in one of the four apartment units destroyed in the crash. He should have been home, but precisely 39 minutes before the Hawker fell out of the sky, he decided to run a few errands.
He made a quick stop at Chase Bank and Giant Eagle and was headed home when he pulled into Dollar General to satisfy a sudden desire for Hot Pockets. It was 2:45 p.m.
In eight minutes, he would have no home to return to.
As it turned out, his entire apartment complex cheated death.
Afternoon is night time in Kayleigh Scarpitti’s world. The 29-year-old third-shift nurse at Akron Children’s Hospital should have been sound asleep when the plane tore through her bedroom. But she had given in to a bout of insomnia, crawled from between the sheets and took her pup, Noah, to Petco.
It was 2:30 p.m. when she closed the door behind her for the last time.
She, her dog and her also-homeless boyfriend spent Tuesday evening with her parents in Brimfield, where the Scarpittis held their daughter in a tight embrace.
Her father, Dan, couldn’t stop thinking of how close he came to being on the receiving end of one of the many heartbreaking phone calls bouncing around the country the day before.
A third unit in the building was vacant. The tenant moved out two weeks ago.
The fourth unit belonged to Beth Montgomery, who has been haunted by one thought: Thank God it was Tuesday.
Any other day would have found the Acro Tool & Die employee unwinding at home after her shift ended at 2 p.m.
But on Tuesdays, she has a standing date with her son for wings and beer in downtown Akron. That routine kept her out of harm’s way, though it didn’t save her cat, Kamyr, her grandparents’ antique bedroom suite or the other personal treasures collected in the course of a full life.
Wednesday morning, Montgomery sat inside the Pizza Pan restaurant in Ellet, wiping tears from behind dark sunglasses. While she grieved for the dead, she also had to face that, at age 61, she suddenly was without even the barest essentials for daily living.
Somberly, she accepted the comfort of strangers who arrived carrying bags of clothes, bedding and other items. Using social media, the pizza shop owner had encouraged residents to drop off donations.
Fifteen people — most of them from damaged apartment buildings on either side of the complex that was directly struck — had been displaced, unable to collect their belongings while investigators cordoned off the site.
Recovery team
Dennis Dirkmaat had been through this before, many times.
He specializes in the archaeological recovery of human remains and has been the primary forensic anthropologist for many air crashes, including the 9/11 attack that took down United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.
The Hawker’s victims, no longer visually recognizable, needed to be carefully removed, but with minimal disturbance to a site that the National Transportation Safety Board had just begun to examine.
At 9 a.m. Wednesday, Dirkmaat and his team of faculty and graduate students from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pa., got to work, the professor reminding his team not to get emotional.
“That’s not our job,” he told them. “Others will grieve. The best thing we can do is do our job well.”
By 2 p.m., the last of the remains were pulled from the wreckage and Summit County Medical Examiner Dr. Lisa Kohler and her staff were able to begin the process of matching victims to dental records and DNA.
Meanwhile, the NTSB investigation was well underway, although representative Bella Dinh-Zarr warned it would be a long process.
The engines are being analyzed by the manufacturer, Honeywell. The landing gear was recovered, and the flaps were found in the proper “down” position.
The cockpit voice recorder captured the final 30 minutes of conversation between Chavez and his co-pilot, Marchese. They can be heard discussing the impending landing and the weather — and then the sounds of impact.
Meteorology experts are studying the weather conditions to see if it played a role. Maintenance experts will examine the plane’s records and any modifications made to the jet. An air traffic control group has begun sifting through air traffic and radar data.
“Our objective is to find not just what happened but why,” Dinh-Zarr told reporters, “so we can prevent it from happening again.”
Authorities began to release the names on Friday afternoon of those aboard the doomed flight, but their identities filtered out long ago.
They showed up as condolences on Facebook walls. They were revealed by fundraisers launched on websites.
Family, friends, former co-workers and old high school acquaintances came forward to share their recollections of people who seemed to be universally loved and admired.
Even some grieving spouses surfaced briefly, offering a glimpse of the depth of their loss.
Andrea Virgin posted a photo of her and a smiling TJ with the caption, “I miss you. What I would give to have you back.”
Diana Suriel’s husband, Joel Castillo, acknowledges his wife’s passion for posting photos of their daughter by uploading new images of the toddler playing at day care, eating crackers, making faces for the camera.
“I know how you loved taking pictures of Gianna,” he said in a message aimed at heaven.
The neighborhood of Ellet has lost, too. Residents may never again be able to take for granted the steel birds populating their sky.
That much seemed evident Tuesday, when a dozen residents huddled together on a Stull Avenue sidewalk in the rain and fading daylight.
Two hours after the crash, they were still watching emergency crews at work when they heard the drone of a twin-engine jet headed for the airport.
They looked up as one, seemed to hold a collective breath, and silently watched until the plane’s lights safely disappeared into the clouds.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.