Today’s Deported Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Twenty-eight Mexican nationals got into an old, twin-engine DC-3 on the cold and clear Tuesday morning of January 28, 1948. The twenty-seven men and one woman were being deported back to their home country because they were working illegally in California as agricultural workers. The deportees had the choice of taking a bus, train, or airplane back to El Centro, California. The novelty of flying and the speed of the flight sounded much better than a long, cold, and bumpy ride.
The DC-3 was owned by Airline Transport Carriers, an air carrier that flew only flights chartered by various government agencies. The flight on that cold January day was chartered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to fly the deportees to the INS Deportation Center in El Centro.
For reasons that remain unknown, Captain Frank Atkinson and co-pilot Marion Ewing took the wrong airplane for the flight. They were supposed to take a DC-3 that was certified to carry thirty-two passengers, but instead took a DC-3 that had seats for only twenty-six passengers and was seven hours overdue for a routine and required safety inspection. The thirty-year-old Atkinson had more than 1,700 hours of flight time and Ewing had more than 4,000 hours. Both had been U.S. Army Air Corps pilots during World War II. Along with the flying crew, Atkinson’s wife Bobbie flew along to serve as a flight attendant. The flight to Oakland was routine, and nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Greeted in Oakland by INS guard Frank Chaffin, the crew found out that there were more passengers than seats in the plane. It is not known if Captain Atkinson realized then that he had flown the wrong airplane or if he had been aware of the fact all along. He apparently did not care, as the plane was flying light. The flight was to travel to Burbank for refueling before heading off to El Centro. Atkinson loaded the evicted Mexicans and their guard into the plane. Three of the migrant workers had to sit on luggage. The DC-3 was slightly overloaded as it bounded down the runway and over the San Francisco Bay.
At approximately 10:30 a.m., workers at the Fresno County Industrial Road Camp, located twenty-one miles northwest of the town of Coalinga, noticed the DC-3 overhead, trailing white smoke from its port engine. Many of the one hundred men at the camp were veterans of World War II and had seen many airplanes in trouble.
Suddenly, the work crew saw the left wing ripped away from the fuselage along with nine passengers, who had jumped out through the gaping hole in the fuselage. The plane caught fire and spiraled to the ground, exploding in a huge ball of fire. The workmen ran to the scene to rescue any survivors, but the only thing that they could do was put out the fires that the blazing aircraft had sprayed over the dry Los Gatos Canyon.
The fiery wreckage was spewed over a two-hundred-yard area. Bodies—some still strapped in their seats—littered the terrain, along with suitcases and shoes. The wing, together with the bodies of the nine jumpers, was found a half mile from the crash site. The majority of the dead were found in the front of the aircraft’s burnt-out hull.
The investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Authority found that a fuel leak in the port engine fuel pump ignited a fire and, due to the extremely fast-moving in-flight air, acted like a cutting torch, burning through the wing span, causing the wing to be torn away.
The people of Fresno turned out for the mass funeral of the twenty-eight Mexican nationals at Holy Cross Cemetery. Catholic mass was said by Monsignor John Galvin of Saint John’s Cathedral and Father Jose de Gaiarrgia of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Twenty-eight identical gray caskets were laid to rest into an eight-four-foot-long mass grave, flanked by officials from Mexico and the United Sates and their respective flags. Twelve of the victims were never identified.
Legendary songwriter Woody Guthrie read about the disaster at his home in New York City and became infuriated that the newspapers had omitted the names of the deportees. He wrote a poem called “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” that lamented that fact. If Woody had read the Fresno Bee, he would have seen that everyone who was identified was named in the Fresno paper, the closest city to the accident.
Mass Burial
Culled from: Death In California by my friend David Kulczyk
Ghastly!
Yosuke Yamahata photographed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945. Here’s one of his haunting images from the book Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945.
