The Last Run
Page 39
Later, all five airmen received the National Association of Naval Aviation’s Outstanding Achievement in Helicopter Aviation, the Naval Helicopter Association’s national award for helicopter rescue, the Naval Helicopter Association’s Regional prize, the Aviation Week and Space Technology Hall of Fame Laureate and Rotor and Wing magazine’s award for heroism in helicopter aviation.
The crews of the other two rescue helicopters received Coast Guard commendation medals, achievement medals and letters of commendation for their efforts.
At the conclusion of his Sitka tour in June of 1998, Ted LeFeuvre became chief of the Search and Rescue Branch of the Seventh Coast Guard district in Miami, Florida. During the next two years he oversaw seventeen thousand search-and-rescue cases and helped develop a new Coast Guard aviation program that led to the seizure of seven tons of illegal drugs worth an estimated $120 million. For his efforts he received the Meritorious Service Medal in 2000 for exceptional leadership.
From 2000 to 2003, Ted LeFeuvre served as commander of Air Station Humboldt Bay in Eureka, California, where he commanded rescue operations of that state’s northernmost coastal region. In June 2003, he wasappointed the Coast Guard’s liaison officer to the Naval Education and Training Command in Pensacola, Florida.
In 1999, while attending a Sunday church service, he met a schoolteacher in Miami, Renee Browning. After dating for five months, the couple wed on April 1, 2000. They remain happily married. Michelle and Cam LeFeuvre now live in Atlanta. Cam is a mechanic in a Volkswagen dealership, and Michelle, who works at a law firm, has patched things up with her father. She and her younger brother frequently visit their father in Pensacola.
David Durham was transferred in May 2000 to San Diego, where he served as a deputy commander. In June of 2002, he was given his first command: Air Station Sitka. Today he works and lives in Sitka with his wife, Trish.
Steve Torpey was promoted to commander in the Coast Guard and is studying for a master’s degree in organizational management. After serving as a flight instructor at the Aviation Training Center in Mobile, Alabama, he was reassigned to Air Station Clearwater, where he flies H-60s and serves as an assistant operations officer. He and his wife, Kari, live in Trinity, Florida, with their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter.
Russ Zullick was transferred to Kodiak, Alaska, in September 1999 and promoted to lieutenant commander. In Kodiak he earned his third, fourth and fifth Coast Guard Achievement Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross for rescuing two survivors whose small aircraft crashed into the side of almost inaccessible mountain along the Alaska Peninsula. He lives in Kodiak with his wife, Deborah, and their three-year-old son.
Dan Molthen lives with his wife, Theresa, and their three children in Camden, North Carolina, and is a lieutenant commander at Air Station Elizabeth City. On December 17, 2000, the cruise ship Sea Breeze I began taking on water more than two hundred miles off the Carolina coast with thirty-four people on board. Molthen and his crew hoisted twenty-six survivors off the ship, crammed them into the Jayhawk’s six-and-a-half-by-eight-foot cabin and somehow made it safely back to base. The rescue set a new record for number of people flown in an H-60. A second rescue helicopter picked up the remaining eight survivors.
Bill Adickes left Alaska in 1998 with his wife, Carin, and their two sons and went to work as a C-130 pilot in Sacramento, California. After a four-yeartour, Adickes was reassigned to Hawaii and now flies fishery patrols in the Pacific, often between Guam and Midway. He has put in for a transfer back to Alaska; he says he misses the people of Sitka, the wilderness and the excitement of helicopter rescues.
Fred Kalt, Lee Honnold, Chris Windnagle and Sean Witherspoon still work as flight mechanics.
Kalt is a chief in Elizabeth City; Windnagle is a chief in Kodiak. After a stint in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Witherspoon was reassigned to Clearwater, Florida. Honnold is now a flight engineer on C-130 planes and based in Kodiak.
Rich Sansone went on to Officer Candidate School and recently was commissioned as an ensign in Cleveland, Ohio. A. J. Thompson continues as a rescue swimmer, now based at Air Station Elizabeth City in North Carolina. Mike Fish quit the Coast Guard shortly after the La Conte case and became a fireman. He lives in Anchorage now with his wife, Heidi, and two children.
David Hanson remains an investigator at the state crime lab in Anchorage, and lives in nearby Eagle River with his wife, Valery, and their six children. On February 1, 2004, he was appointed chief investigator of the state’s Missing Persons Bureau. The big map with all of the colored pins indicating where people have disappeared in Alaska is now his responsibility.
David Hanlon’s remains were shipped to his family in Hoonah, and on September 10, 1998, some two hundred people attended a memorial service for him at the Bethel Christian Center. Honoring an ancient Tlingit custom, his relatives later sailed out into the Icy Strait and sprinkled white wreaths, daisies and carnations across the water’s surface. He is buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Juneau, where his mother and father were laid to rest.
Mark Morley’s body was flown back to Michigan, where a service was held at the Uhts Funeral Home in Westland. He was buried in nearby Plymouth on February 6, 1998—four days short of his thirty-sixth birthday.
That April, his fiancée, Tamara Westcott, had her last name legally changed to Morley. On August 13, 1998—at exactly the same hour that Jesse Evans and Doug Conner came upon David Hanlon’s remains on Shuyak Island—she gave birth to an eight-pound, eleven-ounce boy. Shenamed him Mark Morley Jr. She still lives in Sitka with her daughter, Kyla, and her son.
When he is not fishing or repairing boats, Gig Mork lives with his parents in a new Native housing development out near Indian River in Sitka. His reputation as a solid deckhand on boats—and a solid drinker in taverns—has not suffered as a result of the La Conte episode.
In the aftermath of the sinking, Mike DeCapua returned to longlining. After an account of the La Conte sinking appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1999, his youngest daughter, Melanie Thistle, contacted him. (As it turned out, she had been trying to locate her father for years.) Not long after, Mike DeCapua flew to Spokane and spent two weeks with his daughters—his first visit in two decades.
On his forty-sixth birthday, July 19, 2002, Mike DeCapua telephoned his older brother, Don, with news: he had met a wonderful woman named Wendy and had driven with her from Sitka to Michigan in her car. Two days later, Don DeCapua got another call—this time from Wendy. She and Mike had apparently gone out to have dinner and drinks, separated and planned to meet back at her car, but Mike never showed up. Since he had left all of his personal belongings at her house, Wendy called the police two days later to file a missing persons report. Six months passed with no word. Then, last January, Mike called his brother from Tampa, Florida, where he apparently had been fishing.
Soon after, Mike DeCapua returned to Sitka and his life of fishing on the high seas.
Bob Doyle’s ex-wife, Laurie, married Rick Koval on May 1, 1998, and the two moved with Brendan and Katie to Kodiak. In August 1999, she and Koval divorced. Laurie and the kids still live in Kodiak.
Bob Doyle traveled to Kodiak twice to visit his children, and then moved back to Bellows Falls. He began working odd jobs, including painting homes, working in a meatpacking house, catering, and bartending at Nick’s, the bar and pool hall where he tipped his first beer as a fifteen-year-old.
He is now dating a local nurse and lives with his younger sister, Sally, at their grandparents’ old home in North Walpole, across the Connecticut River from Bellows Falls, in New Hampshire. To this day he keeps a snapshot of Mark Morley in his wallet.
Copyright
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers.
THE LAST RUN. Copyright © 2004 by Todd Lewan.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferabl
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EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-03255-3
FIRST HARPER PAPERBACK PUBLISHED 2005.
Map by John T. Sebastian
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 0-06-019648-3
ISBN-10: 0-06-095623-2 (pbk.)
ISNBN-13: 978-0-06-095623-3 (pbk.)
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