Searchers Find Jet’s Black Box Officer Says Prayer Helped Guide His Metal Spear Through Swamp

First, he prayed. A moment later, Felix Jimenez stabbed his metal spear into the black Everglades waters - and exhumed one of the most crucial pieces of evidence investigators have discovered in the crash of ValuJet Flight 592.

Federal investigators rushed Jimenez’s discovery - the doomed plane’s cockpit voice recorder - onto a Washington-bound plane Sunday for immediate analysis by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Just minutes before the recovery of the so-called black box, lead safety board investigator Gregory Feith had told reporters for the first time that there had been an intense fire in the passenger cabin during the last minutes of Flight 592.

Feith revealed that the aluminum frame of a recovered passenger seat had melted, indicating that the metal had been burning at temperatures up to 1,000 degrees. Heavy smoke, he said, poured through the passenger cabin as the DC-9 jetliner plunged 7,800 feet into the limestone base of the Everglades minutes after takeoff May 11.

Jimenez, a 15-year Metro-Dade police officer, was one of eight people wading shoulder-to-shoulder through the muck and swamp water Sunday afternoon at the crash site. Sloshing along in their bulky white biohazard outfits, they were searching for the cockpit recorder but were finding only tiny pieces of debris and some remains of the 110 people who had died in the crash.

Then they took a short break. And 38-year-old Felix Jimenez turned to prayer.

“I said, ‘God, so far I’ve just prayed for you to keep everyone safe out here and I haven’t asked for your help finding anything. Now I’m asking you to help us find this recorder,”’ he recalled.

“The next time I put my (spear) into the water, it hit the recorder,” Jimenez said.

The recorder was found about 100 yards southeast of the crater where the jetliner nose-dived, NTSB spokesman Mike Benson said.

Investigators put the recorder into a beverage cooler, filled the cooler with water and sealed it with duct tape for its flight to the Washington lab. Investigators, hoping to preserve the tape, did not want to dry the magnetic tape until it was in the lab.

“This is a very important break, to be sure,” Benson said.

Benson, however, said he did not know the condition of the recorder and did not know when its contents would be disclosed.

A clear recording is vital to investigators because two other tapes are marred. The flight data recorder, recovered when a Metro-Dade police officer stumbled over it May 13, is missing the last 50 seconds. An airport tower recording of conversations with the ValuJet co-pilot has so much background noise that it is even unclear whether the pilots had been using smoke goggles and masks during the final minutes of the flight, the NTSB’s Feith said.

Sgt. Jimenez had been working long hours on the search ever since the crash, said fellow Metro-Dade detective Rudy Espinosa. Jimenez’s short break for prayer was not uncharacteristic, Espinosa said.

“He’s a very religious guy,” Espinosa said. “He’s very professional and yet very easygoing at the same time. I’ve never seen him lose his temper.”

At the news conference, NTSB officials had predicted a long road ahead for the crash investigation. They spoke outside a 15,000-square-foot hangar at Kendall-Tamiami Airport that housed hundreds of jagged pieces recovered from the shattered jetliner - 30 percent to 40 percent of the plane, Feith said.

Pieces such as the autopilot computer have been found as far as 1,800 feet south of the crash site, he said, and more volunteers will be walking through wider areas this week to try to find more remnants.

Investigators are centering their investigation on the forward section of the aircraft, particularly the forward hold, which contained hazardous oxygen-generating canisters. They have built a wood-and-mesh frame replica of the front section, a grotesque jigsaw puzzle where they are placing the pieces to get a better idea where the fire started.

It is still too soon, Feith said, to determine if the fire began in the cargo hold or elsewhere, such as the passenger cabin. He did not rule out the possibility that fire could have begun around the time the plane took off from Miami International Airport.

They also found a blown-out tire and were analyzing hundreds of feet of electrical wiring - all in different piles throughout the hangar. He did, however, say there was no evidence to support a television report that fire had destroyed cables that controlled the steering of the aircraft.