Mortician For Airlines Shows Respect In Tragic Duty

LOS ANGELES - As the remains of nearly 50 unidentified victims of the ValuJet crash were laid to rest with a single red rose on each black casket, Sam Douglass had to stand back and admire his work.

"I was very pleased. There are always things that could go wrong, and it went great. The Florida funeral directors did a very good job," he said.

For more than 25 years, Douglass has been the mortician whom airlines reach out to when disaster strikes. Many airlines seek his help to oversee the shipping of remains, the selection of caskets, the embalming and the handling of funeral expenses.

From the 1977 Canary Islands crash that killed 582, to TWA Flight 800 today, Douglass has arrived with the rescuers and investigators to make sure the dead and the loved ones left behind are treated with sensitivity and respect.

Started in the '70s

The 65-year-old mortician from California was first called on in the early 1970s, when a Pan Am jet crashed at the Los Angeles airport a mile from the Douglass El Segundo mortuary. Three people were killed, and the airline needed someone to make the usual arrangements.

"I handled it very, very low-key and kept it out of the newspaper," Douglass said. "When the time came again, other airlines called Pan Am and said, `Who did you use?' "

So began Douglass Air Disaster Funeral Coordinators. Since that first crash, Douglass has worked on nearly 30 more. In the past three months alone he has tended to 340 victims and thousands of survivors.

On July 17, Douglass was winding up arrangements from the May 11 ValuJet crash in the Florida Everglades when he got another call.

"I was at a senior softball tournament and the beeper went off and it was the TWA accident," Douglass said. "My son and I were soon on a flight for JFK."

Douglass faced the second-worst air disaster in U.S. history. The Paris-bound flight exploded and crashed in the Atlantic soon after takeoff from Kennedy Airport. There were 230 bodies in the sea.

Douglass and his son, Sean, 26, set up an office at the county medical examiner's office. As victims were identified and released by the coroner, Douglass worked with some 40 New York mortuaries to prepare the remains for shipment to other funeral homes in the victims' hometowns.

Picked up by hearse

He required the bodies be picked up from the coroner's office by hearse rather than the usual station wagons or vans. He had female victims placed in amethyst-colored caskets, male victims in onyx.

"If the family wants to change caskets, there is no problem," Douglass said. "All reasonable costs are being taken care of by TWA and the company's insurance underwriters, including graves, markers, flowers and other elements of the service."

Unreasonable costs? One family wants a $75,000 burial plot.

"We checked on it. It's not one plot, it's a whole section with four or five plots," Douglass said. "Well, that sort of stretches it, but we'll probably pay for it."