One of the first to arrive at 1907 Kenton St., Berger saw a Piper Navajo crumpled in a small backyard, the tail of the fuselage leaning on the back slope of a garage. Yellow police tape had been strung, and Berger recalls some flakes in the air.
With binoculars, “I could see him in there,” Berger said.
Seemingly at peace in the cockpit was 22-year-old Mark Annest, who had been en route from Mount Comfort, Ind., to Columbus, Ohio, to deliver film to be developed when his plane ran out of fuel.
“I stayed around for a while,” Berger said. “I was so overcome by how peaceful it was. Nobody was causing a ruckus. Everybody was very respectful. And with the snowfall, it was very quiet.”
For years afterward, Berger noticed the memorial notes Annest’s parents placed in the Springfield News-Sun on the anniversary of his death, “and I wondered if his mother would like to know what a nice, peaceful, respectful last moment he had.”
Checking the Indianapolis phone book, he found one Annest, called, and spoke with Mark’s mother, Janet. “She was beside herself” with thanks for the call and his account of the placid moment, Berger said. “We talked for more than two hours.
“We talked a couple of times,” he added, “and she sent me pictures of him.” Berger kept the photo on the corkboard at work. “It’s a picture of him standing by a fountain.”
Now retired, “I think of him a lot,” Berger said, “and I don’t know why.”
A moment in time connected Berger and the Annest family, and the connection continues to this day.
CARMEL, IND.
“I had no problem with it,” Peter Dervenis said, when his wife, Teri, wanted to name their son Mark Garrett Dervenis in honor of her brother, who was killed in a Springfield plane crash on Jan. 3, 1989.
“But are you going to be OK with that?” Dervenis, a thorough-thinking engineer, recalled asking at the time. “And most importantly, are your mom and dad going to be OK with that?”
“I didn’t want to bring up any emotional stuff from the past if that was going to be difficult,” Peter Dervenis explained.
Peter Dervenis, who had friends in common with the late Mark Annest but never knew him, did know something else: that his late brother-in-law will always be a touchstone in the Annest family.
As it turned out, grandparents Gary and Janet Annest happily gave their consent and now call the 3½-year-old charging around the Dervenis home in this north Indianapolis suburb Little Mark.
Not a drop of fuel
Mark Annest, 22 and a spring graduate of the Purdue University aviation program, had about 1,200 hours of experience in the air when he boarded the Piper Navajo at Mount Comfort Airport east of Indianapolis that Tuesday morning.
His job was to ferry undeveloped film to Columbus’ Don Scott airport, then return with a load of developed film.
Running desperately short on fuel, he radioed to air traffic controllers in Dayton shortly after 8 a.m. and was flying through a light snow toward Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport when the plane’s engines sputtered to a stop and it crashed, nose first, into the backyard of a home at 1907 Kenton St.
He was pronounce dead at the scene.
Ed Berger, who went to the site after the crash, said the wreckage eventually was placed behind the building he was working at on East Pleasant Street.
“They took the gas lines off the motor and said there wasn’t a drop (of fuel).”
A presence
A model of a Piper Navajo decorates Mark Annest’s black gravestone in the Hinkle Creek Friends Church cemetery in rural Noblesville northeast of Indianapolis.
Standing there on a gray January day, his father, Gary, recalled the kind farmer who persuaded the Annests to buy the cemetery plots there and spoke of the nature of time.
“In some ways, 21 years is a long time,” he said. “In some ways, it seems like yesterday.”
After his son’s death, Gary Annest spotted a rabbit standing for an inordinately long time outside their family home.
“It was a sign to us that it was Mark,” he said.
Since then, he’s had the same sense when he’s seen other rabbits and experienced the same feeling of his presence not long ago on a visit to Story, Ind., with his granddaughter, a friend of hers, and his former wife, Janet.
“It’s very comforting,” he said. “I just know that that’s Mark saying, ‘I’m still with you.’ ”
An amicable split
It was Janet Annest’s idea that the two should separate in 1999 after 36 years of marriage.
“If things are just right and you have a crisis like we had,” she said, the pressure “accentuates or maybe makes another problem more pronounced.”
Discouraged by their differences in personality and finding herself feeling miserable, “my intent was to keep it as pleasant for Teri (their daughter) as possible,” she said.
Janet Annest has been surprised how things turned out.
“I like him better now,” she said.
“We’re both very amicable. We had Christmas Eve at Teri’s home,” enjoying both grandchildren, and even took Jade, their granddaughter, to Story, Ind., with a classmate for an overnight visit.
“I think we just grieved differently,” Gary Annest said. “We’re good friends. We thought it would be the best way. We’ll always be there for one another.”
The two live about three miles apart near Interstate 69 northeast of Indianapolis, within easy driving distance of their daughter Teri’s home.
Meeting reality
The then Teri Annest immediately missed her brother, of course.
“But I think I was 30 when it hit me,” she said. “The year I had Jade (her daughter) it hit.”
With her daughter’s birth came the realization that “life is really real,” she said. “I couldn’t fathom anything happening to her.”
Although she went through her own grieving, “I didn’t really know what my mother went through and I still don’t,” she said.
What she did know was that her brother’s memory would be part of her daughter’s life.
“I wanted her to know he was a big part of my life,” she said.
Now a seventh-grader who on a day in January was wearing plum and silver nail polish on alternating fingers, Jade Greathouse remembers the stories her grandmother told about her Uncle Mark from the earliest times.
And two years ago, when “Mr. Miller told us to write a story about someone we care about, someone we know,” she decided to write about her Uncle Mark.
She wrote down what her grandma told her: the story about how Mark got into the flour in a cupboard while grandmother was giving Jade’s mother a bath; how he wrote letters home to his dog when he was away at college; and how her grandmother discovered her Uncle Mark could climb out of his crib when she found him on top of a bookcase in the living room crying for help.
“That’s my favorite,” she said.
For the project, she interviewed his old girlfriend, some college friends and at the end of the six weeks project “I knew a lot more” about him.
“We think Mark (her brother) looks like Mark (her uncle,” she said. “He has some of the same facial features, and he’s got a lot of the traits. He likes airplanes and stuff like that. And, obviously, he learned to climb out of his crib like Mark did.”
Jade also helped her mother set up a Facebook site, RIP Mark Annest, in her uncle’s memory.
Uncle Mark, Little Mark
Jade’s stepfather, Pete Dervenis, said that while his wife “talks about him every once in a while,” Jade “knows him as if he were actually here. We talk about it. Nobody really holds anything back,” he said.
Teri Dervenis said the family has also noticed resemblances between her husband, Pete, and her brother, Mark, from high school photos.
“It’s not anything weird,” she said, just something they notice.
In the same way, the grandparents say that while there are some similarities between the two Marks, they’re different people. Their son was of a somewhat calmer disposition than Little Mark, who seems to be in constant motion.
But just as Janet says “the little guy’s been quite a little rainbow in my life.” Gary, a retired railroader, shows off photos of Little Mark playing with a train set and talks of plans for the two of them to take a train trip to Chicago later in the year.
Always there
Despite the loss of their son in Springfield, the Annests have a fondness for the people they met here — some of whom, like Ed Berger, called them, and some of whom they visited after Mark’s death.
A visit by a reporter wasn’t a bother to either, they said.
“A chance to talk about Mark is a joy to me,” Gary Annest said. “It’s a release to talk about him every chance I get.”
Even if shortened, “he had a good life,” his mother said.
“I think about him, but it’s a different feeling. As it gets further away, it’s not nearly as painful.”
For family members who knew him and even some who didn’t, Mark Annest will always be there.
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