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Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Daughter, 10, Speaks to Hundreds of Mourners at Tingwall Service
By Phil Parker
Journal Northern Bureau
SANTA FE — Friends, family and officers of every stripe filled a hangar at Santa Fe Airport on Monday to honor Sgt. Andrew Tingwall, the former New Mexico Officer of the Year who died last week in a helicopter crash as he tried to save a lost hiker.
Among those who took turns speaking about Tingwall at the memorial service was his daughter, 10-year-old Alexis.
An experienced talent-show competitor, she wasn't nervous about addressing the more than 1,500 people in attendance, telling them about how her father helped her overcome a fear of roller coasters by making them more fun.
"He might have touched you if he saved you," Alexis said, "but he might have touched your heart. I really miss him. He was a great, great man."
The hiker Tingwall plucked off a mountain near Santa Fe last week, Megumi Yamamoto of Japan, also died in the wreck. Yamamoto's mother, Junko Yamamoto, attended the service but didn't speak.
State Police officer Wesley Cox, Tingwall's other passenger in the helicopter that night and the accident's lone survivor, was brought to the hangar by ambulance and sat in the front row in a wheelchair, his crushed right leg wrapped and elevated in front of him.
Gov. Bill Richardson took the microphone and said he wanted Tingwall to be remembered as a hero, "even though he'd flinch at that and just say, 'It's my job.' "
Tingwall, he said, saved many people over the course of his career, including two on the day he died, before the ill-fated attempt to rescue Yamamoto.
"I want us to remember him as smiling, cocky and sometimes abusive of the governor," Richardson said. He said Tingwall would order him around after picking him up in a helicopter from the governor's mansion.
After Richardson asked if Tingwall could quiet the helicopter on his way to the
mansion, for the neighbors' sake, Tingwall did the opposite.
"I'm sure he did an extra swoop coming in after that," Richardson said, "with a little smile on his face."
Tingwall was preceded in death by an older brother, Tom, who died in 1989. The two remaining Tingwall brothers, Steven and Doug, stepped onto the podium together Monday.
"I know he's looking down from heaven with our brother, Tom, and our dad going, 'I don't know why they're making that big a deal out of this,' " Steve said of Andy.
Doug, nicknamed "The Professor" by his brothers, said "as long as I can remember, he always wanted to fly. He would jump from his crib onto my bed."
Doug Tingwall told the story of a Roman who stood alone on a bridge over the Tiber River and faced down an entire advancing army.
"Unlike that hero, Andy didn't confront a mortal opponent," Doug said. "He confronted the forces of heaven and earth to save the life of a human being he didn't even know."
Doug said his brother had a "lion's heart and the soul of a philosopher poet," and he asked those at the airport to remember the other victim of that tragic crash.
"He would ask all of us to remember the young woman he and Wes attempted to rescue, to keep her and her grieving loved ones in our hearts," Doug Tingwall said. "To do less would be a disservice to Andy's memory."
Also on Monday, the state Office of the Medical Investigator said Tingwall's official cause of death was environmental cold exposure complicated by multiple blunt force injuries. Yamamoto was killed as a result of multiple blunt force injuries, the OMI reported.
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