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The daughter of Minnesota missionaries in Tanzania found a way to get off a burning jetliner. Her quick thinking worked.
Inside the shattered Congolese airliner, 14-year-old April Mosier raced away from where flames were swelling, a surging throng of human panic close behind.
She came upon a crack toward the right front of the fuselage, too small even for her 4-foot-9, 96-pound frame to wriggle through.
A man stood next to her. Both feared for their lives.
"Let's open this crack; otherwise we're going to die," April said to him in Swahili.
The two clawed at the opening long enough to create an escape route that April, her parents and her injured little brother, along with dozens of others, used to flee the deadly wreckage.
April, her parents, Barry and Marybeth Mosier, and her 3-year-old brother, Andrew, all survived Tuesday's crash in Congo of the privately operated DC-9. The Seventh-Day Adventist missionary family from Dodge Center, in southeastern Minnesota, were on their way from nearby Tanzania to see their oldest son, Keith, a missionary in Congo.
The jet failed to lift off in the eastern town of Goma, rammed through an airport fence and into a bustling market area, then caught fire. The casualties included some of the 80 or so on the plane and others on the ground.
"We tore the crack open with our hands," April said Wednesday evening in a telephone interview from a private residence in Goma, where the family is resting. And while "I felt rushed because of the fire [and] people ... pushing to get out," April said she remained calm.
April, who along with her family moved from Dodge Center to Tanzania in 2000, said, "I was just trying to help myself live. ... I didn't know it was going to be one of the main ways for people to get out."
Including her parents and Andrew.
"It was big enough for us to get out quite easily," said Barry Mosier, 53, who along with his son and his 51-year-old wife fled through the hole that April and the man widened. "I think most of the people got out of that hole."
Pinned inside the plane
Mosier said "the mass of humanity kept pushing" to get out and had Andrew pinned in the plane. "We pulled him up out of there, but that's probably where he broke his leg."
Once away from the burning airliner, April scrambled to find her parents and Andrew, adopted in Tanzania by the Mosiers when he was 8 days old. Barry and Marybeth, their eyeglasses lost, were just as frantic about locating their daughter.
"Somehow, we missed each other," Barry said. "The plane landed on top of the market, the people you are seeing are smashed or burning. ... I didn't want to leave without my daughter, but we needed to go."
Once on the road to a hospital in a police vehicle, he said he heard "several major explosions" from the scene about five minutes later.
Nearly 30 minutes after the crash, April and her parents were reunited at the hospital, she having been spirited there by police.
"When we saw each other, she just burst into tears," Barry said. "My daughter thought we were dead. ... We couldn't believe that the four of us from one family were walking away alive."
Waiting and praying
At the plane's destination, nearly 350 miles to the northwest in Kisangani, Keith Mosier waited for, then prayed and wept when the plane failed to arrive Tuesday afternoon.
After being told of the crash, "I started crying immediately, but I still had to ... make some calls to find out" what happened, Keith 25, said in an e-mail to his friends and to supporters of his family's mission work.
"After several phone calls, a lot of prayer and a lot of tears, I decided to go home, realizing that there was nothing I could do."
But before leaving, Keith said, he knelt under the hot sun and prayed aloud at the edge of an open field next to a parking lot.
Once home, he spoke with a pastor who was in contact with Barry Mosier and had good news: "My family was all safe. I can't express the joy I felt at that moment, knowing that God had spared their lives and that I would see them again."
In a later e-mail to the Star Tribune, Keith said he spoke by telephone with his family and learned that "they lost everything they had except the clothes on their backs ... ."
"But the thing [April] said she missed the most was the travel Bible I gave her for her birthday last year."
While grateful for his daughter's poise, Barry was not surprised. "She's an action girl," he said. "She makes things happen and moves very quickly."
The Mosiers, members of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Dodge Center, also credit their good fortune to "people at home praying for us," said Barry, who eight years ago left behind a 20-year career as an accountant for the mission work in Tanzania.
"We know that's the reason we are alive. ... We know God has more work for us to do here."
Paul Walsh • 
612-673-4482
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