Night Two for the Displaced: About 40 People Remain at the Greenacres Shelter, and One Family Packed for Two Days With a Chihuahua Named Chupita

Armando Perez, a nighttime truck driver, was lying in bed on Sunday when the boom of the Learjet crash jolted him upright. 'I thought, is this freaking Iran?' Perez told the Palm Beach Post. The force shook his body 'like a gigantic subwoofer,' he said - and then came the screams and cries of his alarmed neighbors. Perez, his mother and his stepfather were among the hundreds of residents ordered to evacuate the mobile home community beside the crash site; they were put on Palm Tran buses and driven to the Greenacres Community Center on Swain Boulevard, south of 10th Avenue North, where they remain while investigators bar everyone from returning home.

They packed the way people pack when they think they will be gone a night. Perez's family grabbed two days' worth of clothes, along with their phones, shoes, passports and wallets - and a blanket for their three-year-old chihuahua, Chupita. Park residents were ordered to evacuate without their vehicles, and Perez said some of his neighbors never made it to the community center at all: they may have fled elsewhere, he said, likely out of fear of being picked up by immigration law enforcement. He got within a few dozen feet of the wreck himself and called the smell and heat 'oppressive'; as far as he could tell, none of his neighbors were hurt, though debris damaged homes and automobiles across the park.

The park they cannot enter is the Green Acres community at 3033 South Military Trail, a roughly 50-year-old park of about 75 homes, the New York Post reported. Its two units closest to the crater, Lots 3 and 5, stand just steps from the blast and were spared a direct hit. 'None of the homes were directly impacted other than debris,' Palm Beach County Commissioner Joel Flores said, though he saw wreckage piled on the rooftops of the nearest trailers. Between 400 and 600 residents were bused to the shelter, where the Red Cross set up cots and blankets and the county trucked in portable showers; by Monday, Flores said, approximately 40 remained, with most evacuees bunking with friends or family. What the remaining families cannot reach is ordinary life: their belongings, and the cars and work trucks many of them need to earn a living, sit frozen inside an investigation scene while crews pump water out of the crater the jet left in Military Trail. 'Hopefully we'll get our people back into their homes soon,' Flores said. As of Monday night, officials have given no date.