Ninety-four others also sued, forgoing the chance for a quick payout from a $7 billion victim compensation fund that was established by the U.S. government to protect the airlines from what otherwise might have been thousands of lawsuits.
They have all settled.
Bavis will not.
“People say, ‘Move on.’ But it’s hard to move on because we never got any answers. I just can’t understand how those people even got on that plane,’’ she said in an interview with The Associated Press as she approached the 10th anniversary of the attacks that killed her son, a scout for the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings.
“A lot of people are behind us. A lot of people from 9/11 are behind us. They come up to me and they say, ‘We’re sorry we didn’t go through with the fight.’’’
Bavis does not try to guess why none of the others pressed on. Don Migliori, a lawyer who represents the Bavises and 50 families who went through the compensation fund, said each had its own needs and its own way of dealing with the grief.
Mike Bavis, Mark’s identical twin, said that if his family’s case is unique it is largely because his brother was not a breadwinner with survivors needing immediate help. “If my brother was a husband with five kids, do you think the wife and five kids could afford to wait 10 years to get compensation?’’ said Mike, who is now 41. “The process eliminated people pretty quickly.’’
The Bavises have not settled — and they will not, they say — because they are determined to drag into the public record an explanation of how airline security failed on Sept. 11. (Before the attacks led to the creation of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, pre-board screening was the responsibility of the airlines.)
Their first goal is to document those failures, and Migliori has amassed 200 depositions and millions of pages describing what went wrong. The Bavises would like those papers to be donated to the Sept. 11 museum being built at ground zero — or at least become part of the court record in an open trial — but many have been sealed in the interest of security.
