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Photograph courtesy of Gail Longfellow
Susan Booth
Family critical of airport after a plane crash kills a local dentist
By Oakley Brooks
Saratoga physician Dr. Mark Sajjadi, 75, spawned a tight-knit family of medical experts. He helped his daughter through dental school and funded two of his nephews through medical school. Three other nieces and nephews became doctors.
But recently a deep wound was opened that is testing the family's ability to heal.
On Aug. 5, Sajjadi, his daughter, Dr. Susan Booth, 44, her son Mark, and husband Steve Funderburg, hit a copse of trees just after taking off in Sajjadi's plane at a small airport in Weaverville in Trinity County.
Booth died instantly of neck injuries; Sajjadi suffered serious injuries to his head and spine and remains in serious condition. Funderburg and Mark Booth escaped uninjured.
The loss of Booth was a sharp blow not only to her family, but to a far-flung community she'd built up around her Cox Avenue dental practice. Her expertise in cosmetic dentistry attracted people from as far away as Hollywood and her soft manner drew in local kids.
The Sajjadi family also remains in a funk over the conditions of the crash--they say they feel the tree-lined and sloping runways at tiny Lonny Pool Airport were unsafe and that the airport rules were confusing, and those conditions may have led the elder Sajjadi, an experienced pilot, into the trees.
While the investigating National Transportation Safety Board has not reached any conclusions about the crash, Sajjadi's nephew Hamid Sajjadi says he's already ruled out pilot error.
"He knew what he was doing," said Hamid Sajjadi, who lives in Saratoga. "Nobody in the family is willing to accept that it was his fault."
Mark Sajjadi's only daughter, Susan Booth, grew up in Wisconsin with her mother, and visited Sajjadi in the South Bay during summers. After she left home, she worked as a dental hygienist in the west valley before heading to the University of Pacific Dental School and receiving her dental degree in 1994. She joined Dr. Marcus Bitter at his Cox Avenue dentist office and soon after took over the practice, becoming one of the area's leaders in cosmetic dentistry. This year she was named one of Silicon Valley's "Best Physicians" by San Jose Magazine.
Dr. Dan Araldi, who worked with Booth for nearly two years, said she had a keen eye for the art of reshaping people's gums and teeth with lasers and porcelain.
"If someone walked into the office, she could see the finished product before it was done; it's a very special talent," said Araldi, who is a native Saratogan.
Booth also had a soft touch with patients. Booth's marketing specialist, Gail Longfellow, used to bring her 7-year-old son in for check-ups with Booth. Longfellow remembers Booth taking extra time to put her son at ease in the waiting room.
"She definitely had a following," said Longfellow.
Those close to Booth said the strongest side of her came out in raising her son Mark, born with spina bifida--a congenital spinal disorder that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Hamid Sajjadi said Booth continually lifted Mark out of despair, telling him one day he too could be a doctor. This past year, Hamid says, Mark was strong enough to go off to boarding school on his own.
"He was active and that's because of Susan's strong will," he said.
Booth was also supported by her father, a surgeon who emigrated from Iran in 1947 and by the early 1960s had his own orthopedic practice in downtown San Jose. Around that time, he took up flying and over the last 40 years he amassed some 5,000 hours in the cockpit.
Just over a decade ago, Mark Sajjadi moved to Saratoga, cultivating an extensive garden at his Douglas Lane home, continuing to practice medicine at his San Jose office, and staying fluent in four languages. "He's kept me sharp," said Hamed Sajjadi--Hamid Sajjadi's brother--a Minnesotan who benefited from his uncle's help in medical school.
Booth eventually moved to Saratoga and established her practice there because she wanted to be near her father.
"She was the center of his universe," said Hamid Sajjadi.
During the last weekend in August, Mark, his grandson, daughter and her husband Steve Funderburg flew to Funderburg's mother's 90th birthday party in the Weaverville area, just west of Redding. A party attendee told Hamed Sajjadi, who was not at the celebration, that when Mark arrived at the party he spoke of a strange yellow "X" that lay across one of Loni Pool Airport's runways.
To Hamed, a pilot with nearly 600 hours of flight time, the yellow "X" means unequivocally "no takeoff or landing." Last week, several of his instructors in the Minneapolis area confirmed that.
But the "X" denoted something different at Loni Pool. Because of unstable winds and sloping runways, airplanes were supposed to land on runway 36 and take off on runway 18--the strip with the yellow "X" across it.
But apparently Mark Sajjadi never knew that when he gathered his family into his plane on Aug. 5 to return to San Jose. He looked in his flight manual under "W" for Weaverville Airport, Hamid Sajjadi said, but found nothing: the airport and its special conditions were listed under "L" for Loni Pool. And when Mark Sajjadi taxied to the end of runway 36, he either missed or ignored a small white sign that told him not to use 36 for takeoffs.
"Even if he saw the sign, there was that yellow X telling him not to use runway 18," said Hamed Sajjadi.
Runway 36 was a dangerous takeoff strip because it rose at an angle of more than 3.5 degrees over 2,900 feet, an uphill climb that sucks the power out of small planes. At the end of the runway, just 40 feet from the tarmac, a stand of trees rose some six stories into the air.
The trees had proved lethal to small aircraft over the past two decades, causing three of seven accidents at the airport and the death of six people in a 1983 crash, according to a National Transportation Safety Board database.
"That field is a death trap," said Hamed Sajjadi.
Still, Hamed said his uncle's top-of-the-line, turbo-propeller Beechcraft aircraft should have been able to rise above the trees using the 2,900-foot runway.
He said that according to Funderburg, Mark Sajjadi wasn't stricken by a stroke or heart attack just after takeoff. When Sajjadi reached the end of the runway and realized he wasn't going to clear the trees, he jerked the airplane some 60 feet to the left to shoot a gap between two tree trunks. The trees severed the plane's fuel-laden wings. But the opening left the fuselage intact, where he four family members were sitting. Hamed Sajjadi said his uncle's last-second move to prevent an explosion saved the life of Funderburg and the young Mark Booth.
Susan Booth, strapped into her seat, was killed when the force of the crash snapped her neck.
Her father fractured his lower spine and his jaw. Following the crash, he was taken to O'Connor Hospital in Redding, where he endured five surgeries and 25 hours of general anesthesia.
Hamid Sajjadi said Mark Sajjadi remains conscious but in serious condition.
Services for Susan Booth were held on Aug. 10 at Montalvo's Spanish Courtyard.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
