“What purpose did it serve, other than to create more tragedy?”

“Isn’t that a horrible story?” she asked. “Thank God I wasn’t there,” she said, remembering that during a pretrial hearing the prosecutor left photos of her son’s body on a desk where the mechanics could see them. It put me in a very awful position.” In the end, Lowry wrote a letter, which was never read during the proceedings because the charges against the second mechanic were eventually dropped. “I’m not sure I felt that the trial should be taking place.

“The woman prosecuting the case called me several times, and she wanted me to come over and testify,” she said. On the floor, her dog lolled in a patch of sun. She had no-nonsense short gray hair and wore a bright blue T-shirt her face was ruddy from working in the garden before my arrival. Seventeen years later, on a sunny summer morning in a house across the street from the home where she received that phone call, Lois Lowry told the story of her son and his death, and someone else’s son’s death, quietly and carefully. And in heaven I cannot hurt anyone else, not even by accident.” He left a note to the Lowry family that read: “I know I am going to heaven. The day the trial was meant to begin, one of the mechanics shot himself in the head. The Air Force ignored those suggestions until Grey Lowry’s death but still made an example of the mechanics - court-martialing them and withholding crucial information from the defense team. Those same control rods nearly caused two previous crashes, and multiple reports had recommended easy fixes. The mechanics had attached two control rods into the wrong sockets - a problem caused more by sloppy design than by sloppy mechanical work. But when the Air Force asked Lowry to return to Germany a year later to testify against the two mechanics the military charged with negligent homicide in Maj. The next day, Lowry and her family were on a plane to Germany to bury her son. It was still dark outside the windows of her little brick house in Cambridge, Mass., when she heard her daughter-in-law explain that Lowry’s son Grey, an Air Force flight instructor, died when his F-15 crashed on takeoff. Very early in the morning of Memorial Day, 1995, the children’s author Lois Lowry was awakened by a telephone call from Germany.

Claire son lois lowry