Friday, December 10, 1999
By EVONNE COUTROS
and SEAMUS McGRAW
Staff Writers
Frank Armeli sat in the emergency room at Hackensack
University Medical Center, explaining how Thursday had seemed like just another day off.
Armeli, 42, a 16-year veteran of the Hackensack Fire
Department, was just sitting down at the dining room table of his Central Avenue home in
Hasbrouck Heights with his wife, daughter, and a friend.
They heard a thud, and suddenly, Armeli's day-off routine
was transformed into an unforgettable episode of valor and terror.
"The windows started shaking," Armeli said.
"My first thought was it was a transformer or maybe a truck accident at the
corner."
He went outside, and heard someone from down the block
shout to call 911. Then he saw flames shooting 30 to 40 feet over the back of the home
diagonal from his own. A small plane en route to Teterboro Airport had crashed.
"I just ran up the driveway and that's when I could
hear the person screaming, 'Help me,' " he said. "I didn't know it was a plane.
I had no idea."
When Armeli reached the back of the house, he could see a
man sitting up on the ground next to the burning wreckage. "Straight up on the
ground," Armeli said.
The man was on fire.
"I ran up to put him out," Armeli said. "I
had nothing to wrap around him or my hands. His pants were on fire and he had no
shirt."
Armeli managed to douse most of the flames, and then tried
to drag the man by his ankles, but the victim was losing skin, and Armeli said the heat
from the wreckage was unbearable.
Armeli grabbed the man again, this time with the aid of Al
Kopek, a former Marine from Toms River who was visiting his mother at a home nearby.
Kopek had run from the house after hearing "a plane
flying too low, and too fast," just outside her door.
"I'm a pilot," Kopek said. "I knew there
was something wrong. The engines didn't sound right."
Convinced that the plane was going to come down any
moment, Kopek said he bolted from the house, mumbling a warning to his mother to stay
inside.
Instinctively, the Vietnam veteran followed Armeli toward
the plane. "He seemed to know just what to do," Kopek said. "He was a real
hero."
Together, they mounted a second attempt to pull the
burning man away. Then, there was a secondary explosion.
"We both hit the ground . . . it was enough to throw
us back," Armeli said. They got up again, this time aided by Keith Bruining, a Lodi
firefighter.
They reached the man and tried to douse the flames. Armeli
used his bare hands. Bruining, interviewed along with the others in the hospital's
emergency room, said he didn't remember what he used to help. But Kopek remembered.
The ex-Marine grabbed a tattered green coat from somebody
in the crowd that had started to build. Hours later at the emergency room, he still had
the bloodied and burnt jacket.
Though horribly burned, and bleeding from the mouth with
every breath, the crash victim was conscious, Kopek said.
"He said he was the pilot. We asked if anybody else
was in the plane. He said, yes, a girl."
"I asked him his name," Kopek said. "He
said his name was Al. I said that's my name, too."
Armeli said the rescuers were surprised the pilot could
talk. "We kept telling him he would be fine and encouraging him," Armeli said.
As the three tried to pull the gravely injured pilot from
the ring of fire on the ground, there was another blast.
Bruining remembered being tossed to the ground, and the
pain he felt as a white hot piece of metal fell on his neck.
Kopek suffered a concussion when he was thrown through the
air.
But finally, the three were able to get the burned pilot
away from the flames and heat.
The pilot, who still had not been identified, died shortly
before 10 p.m.
Hospital spokesman Brian Thompson said the man had burns
over his entire body.
Armeli suffered second-degree burns to his left palm and
first-degree to his forehead during the rescue. He and the other two rescuers were treated
and released.
But putting the gruesome images of the night behind them
will not be easy.
"I keep seeing it in my mind," Kopek said.
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