By Ben White Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, November 15, 2001; Page A18
BELLE HARBOR, N.Y., Nov. 14 -- Ann Marie Ruggiero, 27, simply does not believe it. Standing behind taut yellow police tape on a gentle fall afternoon, staring at the burned-out shell of her friend's house, she says she cannot believe the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 was an accident.
"We've lived here all our lives and nothing like this has ever happened," Ruggiero, a special education teacher, said, gesturing toward her mother. "It just seems too strange that this happened on Veterans Day, almost exactly two months after September 11th. I want to believe it was an accident." She looks at the ground. "But I can't." Neither, it seems, can many New Yorkers. In interviews across the city, almost everyone contends the circumstances are too strange: the apparent separation of the Airbus A300's tail fin; the fact that both engines snapped off and crashed to the ground.
"No one in there thinks this was an accident," said Gisela Martinez of the Community Association of Progressive Dominicans.
Standing outside the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where families have come to receive information and identify their lost loved ones, Martinez said the consensus among the families is that despite the measured words of state, federal and local officials, foul play must have been involved. "They all think it was terrorism," she said.
On the A train crossing Jamaica Bay, Christine Sabat, 30, said she is convinced it was an "inside job" -- a commonly held view around New York. Someone must have tampered with the plane.
"It's just too weird the way it all fell to pieces," Sabat said. "Didn't they inspect that plane? It had to be an inside job. Trust me. Somebody who worked at the airport got to that plane."
The skepticism is not limited to the Queens neighborhood where the plane fell, where the stench of burned jet fuel still hangs and reminds one, almost exactly, of the smell at ground zero. It is not limited to Dominicans. It is not limited to victims' families. It is everywhere.
In Midtown at lunchtime, advertising executive Ken Gleason, 39, said there are just too many coincidences. "I think the best theory is that it must have been someone in the maintenance crew," he said.
Gleason fears that, as with crashes in the past, the real causes may remain clouded for months. Or forever. "Things always get murky when it comes to the [National Transportation Safety Board]. We never really seem to get the whole story, the real truth, in the end."
At dusk, with a brilliant orange sunset settling over Jamaica Bay, a woman with a strong Russian accent, who declined to give her name ("I don't want to be famous"), said she, too, wants to believe it was just a horrific accident.
Does she? "No."
"I heard that this plane just came from Boston," she said. "Just like the ones on September 11th."
Earlier in the afternoon, a hundred blocks away on this tiny spit of windswept land, another thick plume of black smoke belched into the air. "Oh no, not again," said an elderly woman. "I'm going to kill myself."
A schoolboy, slouched on a park bench, shook his head. "Far Rockaway has had a bad week," he said, as fire engines and ambulances roared to the scene of what turned out to be a brush fire that burned, briefly, out of control.
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