City marks 20th anniversary of plane crash tragedy
John Stehr/Eyewitness News
Indianapolis - Twenty years ago this weekend, Indianapolis suffered one of the worst tragedies in city history. A military plane fell short during an emergency landing at Indianapolis International Airport.
October 20, 1987 was a cloudy day which followed the second worst crash in Wall Street history. In Indianapolis, Black Monday would soon be the second-most important story.
At 9:11 a.m., the control tower in Indianapolis received word an Air Force jet was in trouble. Four minutes later, the plane slammed into the front of the Airport Ramada Inn.
Larry Alcorn had just left off work as a dispatcher. Paul Spurlin happened to be working across the street from the hotel.
"I heard the three booms, but I wasn't sure at first if it was somebody working on the roof. It was three loud booms because the plane hit the bank first and then hit the ground then went back up in the air and hit the hotel," said Spurlin.
After losing an engine, Major Bruce Teagarden was trying to bring his plane in for an emergency landing. He came up short and ejected as his crippled Air Force A-7 jet came crashing down.
Spurlin was the first firefighter on the scene. "For firefighters, your training kicks in and so I ran across the street and I made what we refer to a 360 of the building to see where the fire was," he said.
Within one minute of impact, the Indianapolis Airport Fire Department began knocking down the jet fuel-induced flames.
"While they were applying foam to the front of the building, I tried to crawl into one of the side hallways to see if I could get down and find anybody," Spurlin said.
Alcorn heard the call at home, but thought it was for a training exercise. "At first I thought well, maybe I won't go but then I heard Paul get on the radio and I started realizing, this must be something," he recalled.
Nine Ramada Inn employees were trapped in the lobby.
"We pull up and we don't see nothing. We see a lot of fire and where there had been a lot of fire and a lot of smoke but didn't see any parts of a plane so we really didn't know what size of plane it was or what type," said Alcorn.
One guest thought it was a terrorist attack or bomb. "I went to the window and I wasn't able to open it so I threw a chair through it." The guest then jumped onto the roof.
Families of the missing gathered at the nearby Adam's Mark Hotel, comforted by each other and Mayor William Hudnut.
"Without a doubt, it was the worst disaster to hit our city since the Coliseum explosion in 1963," said the mayor.
Teagarden survived and to this day has not spoken publicly about the crash. Nine Ramada employees, and a man who stopped to make a phone call, died. Their names are listed on a simple plaque at Holy Cross Cemetery on the south side.
The Ramada Inn scheduled - then canceled - a staff meeting for October 20th, 1987 at 9:00 a.m.
"The other thing we found out is the National Principals Association meeting was going on at the Adam's Mark which was across the airport expressway. Had it hit there, what kind of effect would that have had on the school systems of the United States?" wondered Spurlin.
For more than two years, the charred building stood as a reminder of one of the city's biggest tragedies. The Air Force took that long to complete its investigation. The hotel owners never rebuilt because they couldn't decide on an appropriate design.
A parking lot stands on the site now as a subtle memorial to that day.
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"Once in a while when I'm driving down through there I'll look over and see, obviously the parking lot there now and I'll remember there used to be a hotel there," said Alcorn.
While the hotel owners never rebuilt, the bank branch damaged by the plane is still standing today. It has been converted to a hospice.