35 Years Later, a Survivor With Scars Both Seen and Unseen

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In November, I drove to Zucker Hillside Hospital in Queens, where I was scheduled to meet Astrid López, a Colombian citizen who narrowly survived a plane crash on Long Island in 1990. There I was to interview Ms. López, her older sister, Liliana Donlon, and several others who had provided her care in the 35 years since that devastating accident.

I’ve been a reporter covering the New York City region for years, and I’m used to asking people about difficult, even dark moments of their lives. But this story presented challenges from the very first interview.

I already knew the basics going in: On Jan. 25, 1990, Avianca Flight 52 took off from Bogotá, Colombia, stopped in Medellín, where Ms. López and others boarded, then headed to John F. Kennedy Airport. But bad weather, the need for a series of holding patterns and poor communication between the flight crew and air traffic controllers caused the plane to run out of fuel. It crashed into a wooded hillside in Cove Neck, on Long Island.

Of the 158 people aboard, 73 died.

Ms. López, who was traveling to New York to board a flight bound for Disney World, was 17. Her body was so badly mangled that emergency medical workers believed she was dead. They carried her to a temporary morgue near the crash site, where her moans alerted them that she was, incredibly, alive.

In the years that followed, she would need more than 70 surgeries. It created a pattern that continues to this day: Each surgery is followed by months of pain, and then, when she is healed enough, she undergoes another one.

“I am always in pain,” Ms. López told me during that first interview.

Then she said something I’ve rarely heard anyone admit: Sometimes, she said, she wishes she had died in the crash. The pain, and her fear of it, have prevented her from pursuing her goals, of becoming a lawyer, and a mother.