MISSIONARY, SON REBUILDING LIVES AFTER PLANE CRASH

GARNER - When he got off the airplane that brought him to North Carolina
last year, Jim Bowers wondered aloud to his mother whether he could ever
get the images out of his mind.

The smoke from the guns of a Peruvian Air Force A-37 that shot through the
small aircraft carrying his family. The screams in Spanish of the Cessna's
pilot: "They're killing us! They're killing us!" The blood on his infant
daughter. His wife slumped over in her seat.

Thirteen months later, Bowers credits his faith with sustaining him and his
7-year-old son, Cory, since a single bullet took the lives of 35-year-old
Roni Bowers and the Bowers' daughter, Charity, in the sky over the Amazon
River.

Bowers says he has forgiven the U.S. and Peruvian officials who mistook the
missionary family's plane for a drug smuggler's, even sending Bibles to
those involved.

The two governments have acknowledged errors were made. President Bush
called Jim Bowers and his wife's parents to express regret. Drug
interdiction flights have been suspended and a $8 million settlement from
the U.S. government was reached with the crash survivors, Roni Bowers'
parents and the Bowers' missionary agency.

But Bowers, the 39-year-old son of missionary parents, still longs for
something he doesn't expect to come: an apology from the CIA, who officials
said hired the surveillance crew that first told the Peruvians about the
flight and never explicitly stopped the Peruvians from shooting.

"From the very beginning I wasn't expecting anything except for someone to
admit they did something wrong and to be punished for it," Bowers said from
his mother's home in a Raleigh suburb. "Then I realized as the months went
by that there wasn't going to be anybody punished.

"It doesn't matter how much you forgive a person. When they do something
wrong they should still suffer the consequences."

Still, Bowers has tried to turn this case of mistaken identity into one of
hope.

He has made dozens of speeches at Bible colleges and churches in the
Americas and Europe. A book, "If God Should Choose," and a dramatic video
about the family are now serving to meet the calling of Jim and Roni
Bowers' lives: evangelism and encouraging others to become missionaries.

Jim Bowers' near-daily talks about the tragedy, although painful, seem part
of that calling.

"God has chosen Cory and me to represent him in a bigger way, a lot bigger
than I would have imagined," he said at a memorial service last year.

Jim and Roni Bowers worked in relative anonymity for five years along the
Amazon in northeastern Peru, spreading the Christian gospel among the
riverside villages and training ministers through the Association of
Baptists for World Evangelism.

That all changed the morning of April 20, 2001. The family, flown by
missionary Kevin Donaldson, was returning from the Colombian border where
they had picked up a permanent resident visa for Charity. CIA personnel
aboard a surveillance plane spotted the aircraft and alerted Peruvian
officials. A Peruvian interceptor arrived and shot the aircraft down as the
CIA crew debated whether the plane fit a drug-smuggler's profile.

Jim Bowers was so occupied with extinguishing a fuel line fire on the
Cessna that he didn't realize what had happened. His wife of 15 1/2 years
and his partner in ministry was dead; so was the daughter they had adopted
in Michigan a few months earlier.

Cory and Jim Bowers weren't injured. Donaldson was shot in the legs, but
still managed to land the pontoon plane on the river.

In the months after the shooting, government reports blamed errors by the
Peruvian military, procedural errors and poor language skills by personnel
from both countries for misidentifying the plane and shooting it down.

"They had no reason to suspect us," Bowers said.

Through he's not bitter about what happened, Bowers still chastises those
involved.

"Roni and Charity went on to be with God and I'm convinced of that," Bowers
said. "No one killed them on purpose. It was an accident. It was terrible
negligence and stupidity but it wasn't malicious."

Roni Bowers' parents have a more pointed assessment.

"It was the United States and Peruvian governments that murdered our
daughter," Roni's father, John Luttig, said from Pace, Fla. Luttig, an Air
Force veteran, and his wife, Gloria, have mixed feelings about the
financial settlement.

"You can't put a dollar amount on my child or granddaughter," Gloria Luttig
said.

Jim Bowers brought the bodies back to America and settled in Garner, a town
of 20,000 south of Raleigh, where tobacco fields are giving way to suburban
subdivisions. There, he and Cory moved in with his mother, Wilma.

Bowers took a job at Bethel Baptist Church in nearby Cary, leading Spanish
Bible studies and church services for the area's growing Hispanic population.

Bowers said he is satisfied with the settlement reached after the families
sought a statement of regret for what happened. The government didn't admit
liability or assign blame to the CIA as part of the settlement.

"...My main thing in life was my relationship with (Roni)," he said. Now,
"God has seemed to be much more real and close to me."