They buried their dead. They cannot bury their grief.
They might never.
Signs of tragedy are everywhere. They envelop the good and kind folk of this small town that brags on having Oklahoma State University as its heart. Orange and black, the school colors, hang all over, same as the pain.
Orange-and-black ribbons flap in the prairie wind throughout town. Orange-and-black bows adorn light poles. Orange-and-black flags whip atop antennas of cars and pickups and vans. A fence bordering the famed Gallagher-Iba Arena is filled with black-and-orange cloth strips. The Spirit Rider statue out front of the gym is layered in flowers, gifts, mementos. Even trees contain black-and-orange touches.
Almost everybody is wearing an orange ribbon pinned to their clothes, even 6-week-old Mason Thomas, asleep in an infant carrier in a Bruam’s Ice Cream parlor.
“All of these people were such good people,” Kathy Peacock, Mason’s grandmother, said of the deceased, and that makes the unexplained that much more unfathomable.
Oklahoma State lost 10 of its best people in one of the worst ways. A turboprop plane, one of three aircraft returning from Colorado a week ago Saturday after a game, crashed in a field 20 miles south of Denver. It left a mile-long gash of wreckage. It left years of uncountable hurt.
“There were a lot of tears,” said Landon Jones, 20, a freshman who lives in the athletes’ dorm. “It’s still pretty hard to think about.”
Lost forever were Daniel Lawson Jr., 21, a junior guard from Detroit; Nate Fleming, 20, a freshman walk-on whose lovable presence prompted fans to chant “Nate, Nate, Nate” near the end of blowout games in which he might play; Bill Teegins, 48, legendary voice of the OSU Cowboys football and basketball broadcasts; Will Hancock, 31, coordinator of media relations; Brian Luinstra, 29, trainer; Jared Weiberg, 22, student manager; Pat Noyes, 27, director of basketball operations; Kendall Durfey, 38, broadcast engineer; Denver Mills, 55, pilot; Bjorn Fallstrom, 30, co-pilot.
“I think people in Oklahoma realize life is precious and we need to take care of each other,” said Kassie Stevens, 21, a senior majoring in math.
Stillwater sits hard by the prairies, 70 miles from the big city, miles and miles of nothing but nothing. Everything revolves around the university. The university involves everyone.
“It’ll take a long time for the pain to go away,” said Roy Mason, fire inspector for OSU. “This is something that’ll take the players and fans and student body a long time to get over.”
Mason would know. Bespectacled and carrying girth that would appear to make him a veteran of chicken-fried steak, Mason has lived here for all of his 51 years. He can feel Stillwater’s pain. He has taken to overseeing the east concourse of Gallagher-Iba Arena, which contains an astounding tribute to the OSU family. Thousands of flowers, from everywhere and everyone. Bill Self and the Illinois basketball family sent an arrangement. The Oklahoma Special Olympics staff did too. Same for the family of former Bears tight end Alonzo Mayes, a former OSU star. The parents of the Colorado basketball players, the team OSU played the night of the tragedy.
There are hundreds of notes. Beautiful portraits of the fallen 10 line the concourse, displayed with love and dignity. Officials erected an 8-foot wall that stretches 64 feet long, covered with white poster board that has been almost completely filled with messages written in orange-and-black ink, a touching part of what will become a permanent memorial in the arena.
The messages signal remembrance and hope, love and pain. “To 10 Special Angels,” reads one message. “May our memories of you make us better people,” says another. “Nate, we will never stop chanting your name.” There was even a message written in Swedish for co-pilot Fallstrom.
Townspeople and students come through. Some cry. Others stop and stare. Nobody talks much.
Mason and some visitors got quite a start Sunday. OSU coach Eddie Sutton and his players came through after practice. Sutton ushered them into the concourse instead of letting them go out the back door the way they had since the terrible event. Some players smiled at the messages on the wall. Others nudged a teammate when something caught an eye. They felt the depth of the support.
Sutton knew what he was doing. Sutton has known what he was doing all week, even though he has never known anything this heartbreaking.
“It will be difficult and seem impossible,” Sutton said, “but we will get through it.”
Sutton has been emotional, yet strong. He has dealt with the unimaginable loss of life while welcoming a new granddaughter two days after the crash. His calm words and poised demeanor have drawn praise and admiration, starting with the gut-wrenching task of calling family members of the deceased well into the Sunday morning after it happened. He has been the biggest cowboy of the OSU Cowboys. He is John Wayne in this tear-jerking show.
“There’s none of us who could imagine what it would be like getting on the phone and calling a father, a mother, an uncle or just people that you know and say, `What you heard is correct, he didn’t survive,”‘ said Tom Dirato, OSU’s director of television and radio. “It took a toll on him.”
Shortly after Sutton and the team’s tour of the memorial in the arena Sunday, Bill Hancock came by the way he has almost every day, right up to burying his son Monday morning.
Hancock is a rangy man with a friendly way. He has deep-set eyes. They are pink and swollen. He speaks in a whisper.
“I have highs and lows,” Hancock said. “The lows are the lowest you can imagine. The highs are just above middle. I’m just glad I know there’s a heaven. We had a special gift as a father and son. I can’t think of any bad times. We had no unfinished business.”
Hancock’s mail is hand-delivered to the door these days because the family mailbox isn’t big enough to handle the cards and letters.
“The support we’re getting from people is absolutely carrying us,” Hancock said. “I would’ve thought it was trite if I hadn’t been in this situation. But it’s the real deal.”
Nate Hancock can vouch for that. Nate, Will’s 27-year-old brother, flew from Connecticut to Oklahoma the day after the crash, changing planes at Midway Airport. He asked the gate attendants in Connecticut to leave the seats around him empty because “I wasn’t sure how I’d be with someone yakking at me the whole trip.
“When I got to Midway, I walked off the plane and saw Will’s picture on the TV. Then as I sat down, a woman came from the behind the ticket counter to give me a hug. The people at the gate knew who I was. They even arranged for me to talk to a priest. The support is everywhere.”
Nine days and 10 funerals later, the Cowboys played a game Monday. OSU needed a game. All of Oklahoma needed a game.
The humble folk of the plains got a chance to breathe for the first time in days during a memorial service Wednesday. The service drew more than 13,000 people to the arena that less than a month ago celebrated a rebuilding and rededication. The family section required more than 300 seats. The 10 men who died left five wives, eight daughters, two sons, 12 siblings and one fiance, as well as parents without sons.
Sutton spoke at the service, offering prayers and love. OSU President Dr. James Halligan promised a college education for the children of the deceased.
But they all needed something else. Something good. Something loud. Something to start the healing. For such a little state, it suffers big wounds. Oklahoma endured the unspeakable bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 where 168 people died. The state endured a killer tornado in 1999, the strongest twister ever recorded. And now this.
“I think Oklahoma is cursed,” said Greg James, a waiter at Eskimo Joe’s, an off-campus hangout.
Cursed or not, Oklahoma certainly is all cried out. It needed Monday night’s game against Missouri, and frankly, the result wasn’t going to matter. What mattered was filling Gallagher-Iba Arena with cheers instead of eulogies. The Fleming and Lawson families were in attendance. Students lined up at the doors an hour earlier than usual.
“This was the first day that everybody was upbeat,” junior Granger Nix said of the mood on campus Monday. “Nate Fleming’s parents wrote a letter to the student newspaper that encouraged everyone to get rowdy.”
And they did. After a moment of silence, the fans in the self-proclaimed “rowdiest arena in the country” created an ear-splitting thunderdome as the players took the court wearing a patch featuring an orange ribbon over a “10.” The Cowboys ran off seven straight points to rock the joint, and it was business as usual. Finally.
“This game was one of the most important games I’ve ever coached in,” Sutton said after an exhilarating and draining 69-66 win. “It continues the healing process that we’re all going through. The past few days have been brutal. We’ve got a long way to go, but this was a step.”
As the fans filed out, many stopped to take in the memorial again, the misery of unthinkable pain hitting them again the way it will for a long time to come, perhaps forever.
Near a corner is a table with handmade signs from a daycare center. Will Hancock and his wife, Karen, OSU’s women’s soccer coach, used that center for their daughter, Andie, born Nov. 16. Several of the signs included palm prints in finger paints from the kids at the center. One of the signs had a message:
“Daddies are special and can’t be replaced.”
