A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

There can be few readers who do not feel a frisson of dread when the words Black Thursday are mentioned. That day–January 12, 2012–when four commuter planes went down within hours of each other, resulting in the deaths of over a thousand people, has joined the annals of the devastating disasters that have changed the way we look at the world.

Predictably, within weeks of the incidents, the market was flooded with non-fiction accounts, blogs, biographies and opinion pieces, all cashing in on the public’s morbid fascination with the accidents themselves, and the child plane crash survivors known as The Three. But no one could have predicted the macabre chain of events that would follow or how fast they would unfold.

As I did in Snapped, my investigation into gun crime perpetrated by US children under the age of sixteen, I decided that if I was going to add my voice to the mix, the only way forward was to collate an objective account, letting those involved speak in their own words. To this end, I have drawn from a wide variety of sources, including Paul Craddock’s unfinished biography, Chiyoko Kamamoto’s collected messages, and interviews personally conducted by me during and immediately after the events in question.

I make no apologies for the inclusion of subject matter that some may find upsetting, such as the accounts of those who were first on the scenes of the tragedies; the statements from former and current Pamelists; the isho found at the crash site of Sun Air Flight 678; and the never-before-published interview with the exorcist hired by Paul Craddock.

While I freely admit to having included excerpts from newspaper reports and magazine articles as context (and, to some extent, as a narrative device), my main motivation, as it was in Snapped, is to provide an unbiased platform for the perspectives of those closest to the main players in the events that occurred from January to July, 2012. With this in mind, I urge readers to remember that these accounts are subjective and to draw their own conclusions.

Elspeth Martins

New York

August 30, 2012