Then Jody Bernard, the somber, petite LaSalle County coroner, or one of her three deputy coroners, would climb down, examine the body and pronounce the death.Įach body was placed in a blue bag, then the blue bag was lifted out of the hole.Īt 6:59 a.m., they lifted out Jay Vezain.Īll but Vezain and Schultheis died of traumatic asphyxiation, which means they were crushed to death, probably in the first instant of the collapse, when the walls and floors began to pancake down into the basement. Bierbom's big machine removed the sections. Shortly before dawn, when all the bodies had been located, a chain saw cut away sections of Milestone's floor. People he'd waved to on the street maybe twice, maybe three times a day for a whole bunch of years. So tonight Bierbom was unearthing the bodies of people he'd known all his life. Utica Police Chief Joseph Bernardoni had called him at 6:30 p.m., 21 minutes after the tornado leveled Milestone, and asked him to get there with his skid loader and mini-excavator just as quick as he could. He and his brothers, Mark and Doug, had run their own construction company for 12 years. When firefighters edged close to a body, the heavy equipment backed off and the painstaking labor by hand recommenced, the tender, awful job of verifying what they already knew.īierbom was a local boy, Utica-born and Utica-raised, a slender, wiry man with a creased, weathered, beard-fringed face and the kindest eyes you'd ever hope to see. Now it was a different mission: recovering the bodies.īuck Bierbom's skid loader was waved forward to handle the larger chunks of debris, but they had to be careful, so careful. All of that illumination made it seem as if a strange new sun had been unearthed, a mixed-up one that didn't know night from day.Īt about 1:30 a.m., when the listening devices that were dropped down into crevices continued to fetch only silence, they knew the rescue part of their job was over. The lights splashed up on their solemn faces, which looked steep and angular in the artificial glare. The lights cast an eerie glow on the firefighters in their heavy gear and their hardhats, their steel-toed boots and leather gloves. The whole place was lighted like a movie set. So they kept working, systematically removing buckets full of rubble, pushing back thoughts of anything except the task at hand: dig, fill the bucket, pass the bucket, dig. The eight others still down there, firefighters believed, were dead. Nine had been rescued earlier that night: Jim Ventrice, Rich Little, Jarad Stillwell, and Mike and Debbie Miller and their children Ashley, Jennifer, Gregg and Chris. The 117-year-old tavern near the corner of Church and Mill Streets had taken a direct hit and collapsed into a ponderous heap of wood, stone and concrete, trapping 17 people who had sought shelter within its thick walls. That was where the firefighters now were gathered, hundreds of firefighters from 52 units throughout the state. April 20-a tornado had barreled through the town of Utica in north-central Illinois and, with a tornado's savage whim, had shunned a building here but shredded one over there. It began to rain, but nobody noticed.Įarlier that evening-at 6:09 p.m. Buckets of debris were passed from hand to hand along chains firefighters. They thought they'd gotten to everyone who was alive, but you had to be sure. ![]() They picked at the pile, inch by inch, stone by stone, just in case.
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