The agent's gesture may have saved Lawson's life. Hours later, after walking away from the crash of Might 405 with minor scrapes, Lawson learned that at least one passenger in row six, to which he had original been assigned, was among the 27 people who died when the plane veered off a snowy runway and dived upside down into Flushing Bay. The actor was one of 24 survivors.
Lawson remembers his uneasiness building as a snowstorm forced departure delays; dining the long wait, the plane was deiced twice. When it came time for takeoff, Lawson's fear turned to terror as the plane dipped to the left and then crashed. "I saw this orange flash out the window," he says. "We flipped and flipped, and then I heard the sound of grinding metal."
Moments later Lawson was upside down and underwater, still belted in and trapped by a pile of debris. "Something inside me said, 'Quit struggling and be peaceful,' he says. "Then something else said. 'Get out of here.' " With a surge of adrenaline, Lawson worked his way free and gasped for air as he blindly found the surface of the water. "I looked around, and I was in this jagged kind of hell, surrounded by charred, ripped pieces of metal," he says. "There was an opening there that had the glow of firelight, and a man reached down for me."
Flames flared near Lawson after he emerged through the hole, so he quickly jumped from the plane and waded toward the shore in waist-deep water. "A guy wearing a hooded sweatshirt saw me and said, 'Hey, man, let me help you,' " Lawson says. "Then he said, 'Are you on All My Children?' "
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
