Those Who Perished, Survived Represent a Slice of America

MINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 4 -- Sherry Engebretsen was in the black, two-door Mercedes convertible she had worked for years to get. Artemio Trinidad-Mena was in the white Ford pickup he had bought last month. Patrick Holmes was in an old Saturn, hurrying to catch the Minnesota Twins baseball game on television.

At 6:04 p.m. Wednesday, the three were together on the long slab of concrete over the Mississippi River known as the Interstate 35W bridge. They, and the others with them at that moment, were a tiny community, an unscientific cohort, a slice of America. Stuck in traffic on a midsummer evening on an aging bridge so unremarkable that it lacked a proper name.

Julia Blackhawk, a member of the Winnebago nation, was there, too. So was Paul Eickstadt, who was driving a tractor-trailer to Mason City, Iowa. And Dennis Winegar, who had just been to the hospital to have his kidney transplant checked.

Joining all of them on the span were 58 tired children and counselors from an inner-city community center, headed back on a rented bus from a field trip to a swimming park. And scores of others who were trying to make it home, or pick someone up, or get to dinner, or to the soccer game, or just finish out the day in towns around the big bend in the fabled river.

All their fates were determined at 6:05 p.m., when the Interstate 35W bridge groaned, heaved and came apart.

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Engebretsen, 60, "was in her dream car" that evening, her daughter Anne said. "Black, two-door, hard-cover, 280SLK." She'd had it a little over a year.

Engebretsen of Shoreview, a northern suburb, had worked hard her whole life, most recently with Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a downtown insurance company. Anne, 20, and sister, Jessica, 18, were adopted from Bogota, Colombia, by Engebretsen and her husband, Ron.

"My dad told her to just go for it," Anne said of the car, "because she deserved it. . . . She worked harder than anyone can ever imagine. She worked for her daughters and her family."

"She was just proud" of the car, Anne said. "She took it everywhere she went. One of her favorite things to do was drive with her mother with the top down."

Engebretsen was probably trying to save time on the I-35W bridge, Anne said. She usually took the adjacent 10th Street Bridge out of town. The 35W must have looked good, even though several lanes were closed for construction.

"She probably just looked down the bridge and saw it wasn't very busy, so she decided to take a short route home," Anne said in a phone interview from the family's home. "She talked to my sister at 5:39 p.m. and said, 'I'm on my way home. I can't wait to have dinner with you.' "