Sounds from a flute floated through the smooth, circular halls of the Jacobs School of Music while footsteps kept the rhythm on the old marbled tile. As doors to classrooms and practice halls swung open and shut, the music of Thursday, April 19, weaved in and out of ears that paused to listen. \nWhispers of a dramatic piano melody trickled down the stairs. It came from the school’s Recital Hall. A student ended his piece to applause as another entered to begin his audition. A boy and a girl talked in quiet voices about their aching fingers and tense nerves as others walked by in a hurry.\nIt was an ordinary day, yet still no one who passed could help but look at the encased bulletin board that held five pictures and five stories about five incredible lives. \nImages of late IU music students Robert Samels, Zachary Novak, Garth Eppley, Georgina Joshi and Chris Carducci hung in honor of their contributions and in remembrance of the tragic event that led to their deaths just after midnight, exactly one year ago Friday.
The Shock\nDean of the Jacobs School Gwyn Richards will never forget the phone call that summoned him out of this bed around 5:15 a.m. April 20, 2006. A few Jacobs faculty members were at the Monroe County Airport. \nA plane had crashed. \nThe five were returning by plane from a rehearsal at Purdue University in West Lafayette. Joshi, an experienced pilot, sat in the cockpit. After 11:40 p.m. April 19, the tiny aircraft disappeared from the radar. It would be found nearly five hours later tangled among the trees in the woods not far from that same airport. \nRichards would spend hours waiting to hear the identities of those inside the six-seat passenger plane, one day concealing those same identities, and one year leading the students, faculty and staff of the Jacobs School from sorrow to peace. \n“I knew them all,” he said. “They were so often in performances. We were together a lot. You get to know the students and the parents. They are music majors from the start. That’s one of the things we are able to have here - just such a close relationship with our students.”\nRichards remembers speaking to Joshi at a a performance about a week before the crash. He remembers a few more of the group being featured not too long before in the world premiere of “Our Town.” More specifically, he remembers a long conversation with Samels about a concert he had attended. \n“These were extraordinarily talented individuals who had a passion for what they loved,” Richards said. “Being around them you just sensed that.”\n–––\nIU graduate music student Greg Brookes was at the apartment he shared with crash victim Chris Carducci the morning his friends came over with a terrible suspicion. They had heard of a horrible rumor the night before. Carducci was nowhere to be found. \n“We were sitting in the living room just waiting when a friend finally came by about a half hour later,” Brookes said. “He let us know. Of course, they didn’t confirm anything until much later. Between that time there is a part of you that is holding on to some kind of hope. \nI know they didn’t release the names because they hadn’t gotten a hold of the families yet. We respected that. And, in our hearts we already knew.” \nAside from living with Carducci for two years, Brookes also had relationships with three other students lost in the crash. \nHe had known Samels for five years. He took a class with Eppley. And he met Joshi just one year prior to her death. \nAlso an airplane enthusiast, Brookes and Joshi bonded over aviation. \n“We enjoyed talking about flying. She was a more experienced pilot,” he said. “I never did go flying with her, but she was always so free.” \nEerily, Brookes eased the worries of Carducci’s girlfriend after she expressed concern that her boyfriend would be riding in the plane a few months earlier. \n“I told her not to worry,” he said. “And now, she had come back with a bunch of other people to find out where he was. There was something about it that made me think, ‘Wow, this is pretty scary.’” \n–––\nChair of the Department of Voice Mary Ann Hart had no knowledge of the incident before signing online later that morning. \n“I looked at my e-mail that morning and saw a message from the dean about a serious accident,” she said. “I Googled it, to find out what had happened. As soon as I heard it was an airplane I knew it was Georgina. I knew that she flew that airplane all the time. I was stunned.” \nAs she rushed to dress, Hart remembers the only thing on her mind besides the shock was her desire to get to work as soon as she was able.\n“None of us knew quite what our role could be at the beginning,” she said. “We didn’t know what had happened. We were just there for our students and for each other.\nHonestly, most of the day was spent trying to keep the students away from people from the outside, like the media, who were trying to get people to speculate on what had happened. Most importantly, we didn’t want people naming students who weren’t on the plane.” \nNot unlike Richards and Brookes, Hart also knew the students who she would later learn died due to what the Monroe County coroner said was blunt force trauma. \n“I knew Zach the least,” she remembered. “Chris Carducci, I had seen in many operas. For Georgina, it was the same. Robert I had in class. My administrative duties put me in contact with so many of the students. They were no exception.”
The Grief \nDean Richards knew the hardest thing he would have to do so far in his life would be placing phone calls to each of the five families of his students.\n“After we had finally identified who we thought the students were, we talked to the coroner to see if we could say anything (to the families),” he said. “But we didn’t have evidence. They told us it was our call. We talked to the University from the airport. They didn’t feel like they could do anything, and once again left the decision up to us. \n“I couldn’t help feeling like we needed to talk to all of them. I wanted to be very specific about everything that we knew. We knew we couldn’t find them, and we had a feeling that they were on the plane, but no one knew for sure.” \nOne by one, Richards dialed his phone to deliver the worst news a parent could receive about their child. Unfortunately, to the Samels family, someone had beat him to it. \nA reporter from the Indianapolis Star had received names of the victims, only to mistakenly unveil the news to a family who had no idea their son was involved in a plane crash.\n“By the time we reached them, they had already been spoken (to),” he said. “It was the most difficult thing I’ve had to do in my life. The phoning of those families was something I never thought I’d ever be in a situation to do. But we felt they needed to know right away.” \n–––\nFor Brookes, the pain of losing four personal friends and five great musicians was immense.\n“Well certainly, this experience is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever gone through,” he said. “And certainly you go through this and you are always stronger. When I look at how much they enjoyed what they did, it makes me want to work that much harder because they don’t have the chance to.”\nBut perhaps harder than dealing with the fact that his friends and his roommate were gone, was having to deal with Carducci’s empty room in the apartment they shared.\n“It was absolutely hard to see all of his belongings there for that week before his parents came to collect his things,” he said. “But it was also very hard to see all of them being boxed up and moved out. That was the one thing that seemed to make it real.”\n–––\nAbove everything else, Hart knew one thing: The music school had lost five incredible sources of talent and five incredible people.\n“I knew the level of talent we lost,” she said. “Knowing them, I knew what we had lost and what the world of music had lost. Those were students who were going to make contributions to the arts and to the music professions.\n“As for the personal part, I can’t compare our grief to the grief of the families but I think about them all the time. Every day there is something that makes me remember them. I thought today about the fact that in a few years all the students who had come into contact with them will have moved on. But the people who will still be here, the faculty, will keep the memory alive.”
The Strength\nRichards knew his only job in respect to the tragedy was to provide all involved with a place and a process to grieve. \nMemorials were coordinated for families and students to attend. Buses transported students to funeral services, and the Jacobs family created a bond.\n“In a way, that was the most incredible week of my life,” he said. “Everyone came together in a way that I could only have hoped for. Seeing our students interact with the families of the students was a sight to behold, and I was so incredibly proud.\n“I saw students at these services fight through the emotion of the moment that they were feeling and then perform, only to sit down and be completely consumed by what they were feeling and break down. It was impossible to not be proud of what they had just done.” \nThree-hundred and sixty five days later, Richard calls his school a stronger, closer unit of people who bond over the music they’ve found through a heartbreaking event. \n“Music is a bonding agent through this even beyond what we had thought it to be,” he said. “I was impressed at both the students and the way they acted and impressed at the strength of the bonds and how diverse those bonds are. I have not known or realized they were as strong as they were.”\n–––\nFor Brookes, a hard realization set in the day he visited a family cabin. \n“It was so beautiful, and I realized, Chris will never get the chance to see this,” he said about a friend who touched his life. “I’ve realized that sometimes in the school setting, friends come and go; you are used to friends leaving. But I still catch myself thinking, ‘Oh, Chris is off somewhere.’ But then I remember he’s not. \n“Through this we’ve all learned to appreciate what you have that much more. There is no time to dwell. You need to be happy. You know that every single one of those people want us to be happy. I think we are doing that for the most part.”\nMoving on is never easy, but for Brookes, the healing process is a road that he will continue on with his classmates – through the music.\n“We try to honor their memories the best we can,” he said. “The grief goes in waves. This is my last year of chorus work and I’m feeling a lot of senioritis. I think a lot of that has to do with just the energy that is expanding to having to try to recover from something like that. We go through periods where we don’t think about much about it at all, and we go through periods, like this time of year, where we think about it all the time.”\nForgetting isn’t an option – embracing the memory is.\n“We realize that the younger crew doesn’t know who we are talking about,” he said. “I think for the most part people don’t talk about the five of them in sad terms. The conversations we have are funny; we like to remember the good times.”\n–––\nFive swinging lights. That is what Hart says she remembers most about the Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that was to be performed by the entire Jacobs school a mere five days after the accident. Five students were missing from the crowd of their peers, who were wearing red and white ribbons and heartbroken faces to commemorate them. And five swinging spotlights shone down on them. \n“It was ironic that Beethoven was going to happen anyway,” she said. “Some of the soloists were extremely close to the five. It was incredibly hard and difficult music to begin with, but the heartache made it even harder. It was ‘Ode to Joy.’ It’s about the defiance and joy that will triumph over all of this sadness. It’s hard to perform during grief, but you want so much to honor these people that it puts you in a place outside of your grief.” \nIt was the music that brought them together, and the music that helped them bear being apart.\n“It’s sad, but we have great memories of them as people and performers,” Hart said. “It makes you take each day a little more seriously; it forces you to find the music within every day.”\n–––\nAs the doors to the Recital Hall fling open after another piano piece, there is applause and then a silence. For a moment it is quiet, but the memory that remains on the bulletin board speaks in volumes. Then, a chorus of laughter is heard in the distance. After the heartache of the Jacobs school, there is hope, there is music, there is laughter.
