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SOMETIMES, THERE IS JUST NO SENSE TO WHAT HAPPENS, APPARENTLY ARBITRARILY, IN OUR EXISTENCE.
And this appears to be one of them.
Forty-nine people died on Sunday after a flight out of Kentucky crashed, presumably because the pilot -- the lone survivor as I write this -- took off from the wrong runway, a runway that was too short.
The pictures above show the runway and the site of the crash, where police cars are lined up along a road parallel to that runway of death.
This type of thing seems to happen quite often and at random, just a happenstance and the planets not aligning, an inevitable potential consequence of air travel.
But it has a particular meaning to me only because two of the people who died on that plane had a small, but significant, tie to the city I live in, as described below.
I interviewed this guy once while covering a Northern Baseball League game between the Winnipeg Goldeyes and the Fargo, North Dakota, Redhawks. Fargo is about two hours from Winnipeg.
He just got married on Saturday. A day later, he and his new bride are dead. How can that not make you think how quickly beautiful things can come to be...and then how in a heartbeat they can be taken away?
FORMER REDHAWK ABOARD DELTA AIRLINE FLIGHT 5191
Jon Hooker and wife lose life in plane crash
FARGO, N.D. – The Fargo-Moorhead family received word Sunday morning that former RedHawks relief pitcher Jon Hooker and his wife were aboard the Delta Airlines Flight 5191 when the plane crashed shortly after taking off from Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky.
The two, who were married on Saturday, were part of 49 people on board the 50-passenger flight that lost their lives.
Hooker pitched for Fargo-Moorhead from 2002 to 2004 and was a member of the 2003 Northern League Championship team. Over 2½ seasons with the ballclub Hooker compiled a 5-5 record with a 4.28 ERA and four saves in 63 appearances out of the bullpen.
I'm not one to pray. But thinking about someone and feeling for them is praying. And I'm doing some of that today.
