The 1996 F-14 Crash in Nashville, Tennessee

Back then, almost twenty years ago, we were a poor family of six, living in a threebedroom, one-bathroom house less than four kilometers from Nashville International Airport.
Every day, large airplanes would fly overhead, close to the ground, shaking our windows. They
included commercial, private, and military planes. We didn't have a lot of money, but as I recall
we had a lot of love.
My father was a teacher at the time, I think, and my mother was a nurse who worked the
night shift. The local school system wasn't very good, so my mother taught my two brothers and
sister and me at our home herself.
One evening, while my mother drove toward downtown Nashville where she worked at
Baptist Hospital, she was overcome with grief as she left our neighborhood. She didn't know
why, but she suddenly felt scared and worried for our family. She was filled with dread and
terror. Tears mysteriously flowed down her cheeks. Something was terribly wrong, but she
didn't know what. So, naturally, she prayed and prayed, and prayed. She prayed for protection
for my family. The feelings subsided after a bit. She arrived at work after about thirty minutes
and put that experience aside.
The next night, January 28, 1996, she again drove to work. Nothing remarkable happened
on the way there. The next morning, Monday morning, she returned home. Coincidentally,
January 29 was my father's birthday. He was taking the day off and spending it at home with us.
While Mom went to sleep in their bedroom, Dad and we children watched a movie in the living
room. And that's when we heard it...
On January 29, Lt. Cmdr. John Stacy Bates was visited by his parents. They were visiting
him from out-of-town. He was a pilot, and wanted to impress them. So, he and his co-pilot, Lt.
Graham A. Higgons, got into a Navy F-14 Tomcat and flew into the sky. Lt. Cmdr. Bates steered
the plane into a very steep vertical ascent. He knew his parents were watching. And that's when it
happened...
Late on the evening of January 28 (this is the previous night), a good friend of ours from
church was in bed when she suddenly felt strongly compelled to pray for my family's safety.
Somehow, our lives were in danger. She prayed and prayed. Finally, she saw in a vision Gods
hand moving a dangerous object in the sky out of the way. She felt peace, and went to sleep. The
next morning, she called our pastor. She told him about her experience. One or two hours later,
she turned on her TV, and she saw it...
That morning, an elderly couple surnamed the Newsoms was at home, just a couple
houses from my family on the other side of the street. Now, Mr. Newsom had terminal lung
cancer. And, on this particular morning, he had a doctor's appointment. Fatefully, he decided not
to go to that appointment. He and his wife stayed home that morning. Mr. Newsom fixed big
machines in his spare time. Coincidentally, he had just finished repairing a tractor for a man
named Ewing T. Wair. So, he called the man, and told him to come over and pick up his tractor.
Mr. Wair came over. While he was with the elderly couple, there was a very loud explosion high
in the sky...
Lt. Cmdr. Bates could not handle the steep ascent. He experienced vertigo; he mistook up
for down, and down for up. Seconds later, there was a thunderous roar above my family's house,
followed immediately by an earth-shaking explosion a few houses down.
The pilot had inadvertently flown the jet at about 643.7 kilometers per hour into the
ground. The F-14 had missed my family's house by only a matter of meters. When we rushed

outside, we found burnt roof tiles from our roof in our front yard. The jet's engines had singed
them. (I still have them in my closet in my home in America.) The pilot, the co-pilot, the elderly
couple, and their guest had been instantly killed. The couple's house had been incinerated. The
house next to it also caught fire. Fortunately, the people inside were not seriously injured.
A still from an aerial video of the crash's aftermath.

Within minutes, news of the incident

was being broadcast throughout the USA. For
about two weeks after that, the military closedoff my neighborhood. Months later, the
government gave many of our neighbors and us
enough money to move to other houses. In
spring of 1997, we moved into a house in
Murfreesboro.
Oddly enough, we sold our old house to
some friends of ours. They made a startling
discovery: a place in the house's very large back
yard where my youngest brother and his little
friends had often played together had actually been a snake pit. There were many snakes there.
Yet, my family had hardly ever seen any snakes, and no snake had ever attacked my brother or
anyone else in our family in the eleven years that we had lived there.

This is from the front page of The Tennessean on January 30, 1996.