Date with destiny finally arrives

Fate was kind to Felix Sanchez, an investment adviser who worked for Merrill Lynch at the World Trade Center until he left on September 10 to set up his own firm, advising baseball players from his native Dominican Republic on how to manage their money.

One day later, the twin towers came crashing down.

But on Tuesday destiny visited Sanchez, aged 29, and he was not spared a second time.

On his way to his homeland to meet his new clients, he chose American Airlines Flight 587 and perished when the plane plummeted into the Rockaway district of Queens borough minutes after take-off.

The story of Sanchez is just one among myriad personal tragedies that emerged from amid the greater tragedy of the crash of Flight 587.

None was more heartbreaking than the confirmation that among those on board were five infants.

Small enough to board without their own assigned seats, they were strapped to the laps of parents when the airliner went down. The body of one baby was found in the arms of his father.

While investigators continued to see no link between the crash and the events of September 11, ties between the two continued to surface.

Hilda Yolanda Mayor, aged 26, had also escaped with her life that day. Employed at a branch beneath the twin towers of Au Bon Pain, a sandwich shop, she had managed to flee to safety before they both collapsed.

But this week, she also was on the doomed Airbus.

Then there was the sad tale of Navy Petty Officer Ruben Rodgriguez, who took the plane to meet his wife and children in the Dominican Republic.

The 32-year-old sailor had spent the weekend visiting family in New York after a seven-month stint on the USS Enterprise, the first US aircraft carrier to report for combat in the war on terrorism.

Friends of Sanchez, meanwhile, shared a sense of disbelief that he had been robbed of his life after cheating death nine weeks previously.

"After the World Trade Center, he had a renewed outlook on life,"said a friend, Sid Wilson. "And the last time I saw him, he was so high on life."

Others, however, did cheat death, including Pamela Young, an American Airlines flight attendant who usually works the JFK-Santo Domingo route.

She was off work to attend a course to become an estate agent, which she started after deciding she had had enough of her career given the events of September 11.

In so many cases, families who were already separated by an ocean have now been sundered for ever.

For many Dominicans in New York, their time in the United States was spent accumulating money for a better life for themselves and also for those left behind in their homeland.

Rosa Peraz, 53, for example, had been working for 10 years as a domestic employee in the city, earning enough to build her own apartment back home where she kept her possessions carefully protected from the dust with plastic sheeting.

She was among those on board.

- INDEPENDENT

Full coverage: Crash of Flight 587