Survival is rarely a matter of simple luck. For Hilda Yolanda Mayol, it was a cruel illusion. On September 11, 2001, terrorists struck the World Trade Center. It became one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks in U.S. history, resulting in thousands of deaths. Yet, the 26-year-old Dominican immigrant had the good fortune to escape. She worked as a waitress at a restaurant on the ground floor of the complex. And before the Twin Towers collapsed to the ground, she scrambled through the smoke. She made it out alive.
Needless to say, she felt blessed to see her family again. But the mental scars ran deep. She wanted to heal. Or at least escape the lingering trauma of ground zero. To that end, she planned a trip to her native country to take her mind off the terror. Her mother and her two children had already traveled there from New York two weeks earlier. Which meant she was finally heading home to the Dominican Republic to vacation with them. Her luck, however, lasted only a further two months.
On November 12, 2001, Mayol boarded American Airlines Flight 587 out of John F. Kennedy International Airport. The regularly scheduled international flight was bound for Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo.
According to records on Find a Grave, she had been born in 1975. And she was just another young mother looking for peace. Instead, she walked into a second catastrophe.
Five Minutes in November
Flight 587 never made it out of New York. Just five minutes after takeoff, the Airbus A300 crashed into the neighborhood of Belle Harbor on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens. The location of the accident sparked immediate panic. Which was natural coming only two months after the September 11 attacks in nearby Manhattan. And the crash initially spawned fears of another terrorist attack. But investigations proved otherwise. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) later attributed the disaster to a tragic mechanical and human failure.
The plane had flown into wake turbulence from a preceding Japan Airlines Boeing 747-400 that took off minutes before it. In response, the first officer overused the rudder controls. According to the NTSB, this aggressive use of the rudder was the result of a flawed training scenario that exaggerated the effects of wake turbulence. Which stressed the vertical stabilizer until the rudder was ripped completely from the aircraft. The intense aerodynamic forces were so severe that the airliner's two engines also separated from the aircraft before impact. The crippled plane plummeted from the sky. And all 251 passengers and nine crew members aboard perished. Up to a further five people on the ground also died in the accident.
With 260 total fatalities, it remains the second-deadliest aviation accident to have occurred in the United States, behind only the 1979 crash of American Airlines Flight 191. Or any other disaster on American soil. Which makes it the second-deadliest aviation incident involving an Airbus A300. Hilda Yolanda Mayol was among the dead. She had beaten the impossible odds of 9/11, only to perish 62 days later in a completely unrelated disaster. Today, the world is left with very few markers of her life.
And there is only one photo of her in existence, preserved on her Find a Grave page.
A Cabin Filled with Immigrant Dreams
Mayol’s tragedy was part of a much larger, collective heartbreak. As The Guardian reported, on Flight 587, "myriad immigrant stories of hope foundered." The cabin was filled with people striving for better lives. Working multiple jobs. Or simply trying to return to the embrace of their native communities.
The Guardian documented the story of Ana Made, an 85-year-old woman who was finally leaving the South Bronx for her native Nizao after being confined to a wheelchair. Her daughter-in-law, Alba Mercedes Perez, shared the bittersweet reality of her move, stating: "Life was too difficult in the Bronx, and here [in the Dominican Republic] she had her community and her family." And not wanting his mother to travel alone in her fragile state, her 52-year-old son had traveled with her. Both died in the crash.
Then there was 38-year-old Tito Bautista. He was a dedicated father who changed his flight at least three times to accommodate the shift patterns of the two jobs he worked at in New York. And he was heading to the Dominican Republic for a beautiful reason: to collect his son and bring him back to America, hoping he could give him a better education.
The sudden finality of the crash shattered entire family trees in an instant. Or torn them apart forever. A family of five from Washington Heights suddenly became a family of two after Roberto Despradel perished with his young sons, Lorenzo and Robert. Which left behind a grieving widow, Ylsa and their six-year-old daughter, Gabriella. The weight of that loss echoes through the words Ylsa shared after the crash: "The pain is too much. I cry and I cry. But I need to be strong for my little girl."
An Importance to the Place They Left Behind
Every single name in this article is a massive tragedy. A mother trying to heal. A grandmother escaping the harshness of the Bronx. A father working two jobs for his son's future. And two young brothers lost in an instant. They have an importance to the place they left behind and the home they never reached. To say the least, fate can be unimaginably harsh. Hilda Yolanda Mayol and her fellow passengers were moving toward hope, vacation and renewal. However, their lives were cut short over Queens, binding their memory forever to one of the darkest autumns in New York history.
