Margaret Jean Thomas, 18, of Nebraska, the mother of a 17-month-old, died Sunday along with her instructor, 44-year-old Greg Hunter.

Justin Thomas, 24, yesterday recounted the horror of learning that his sister died on the skydive he bought her as a present to celebrate both Christmas and her coming birthday Jan. 16.

"She was a little sister, and trusted everything I said," Thomas said. "I felt very responsible. I was absolutely devastated, at a loss, and I didn't even want to go on."

Thomas said investigators now have told him the pattern of the impact indicates that Hunter did everything he could to make sure that he hit the ground first, in a final desperate attempt to save Maggie Thomas' life. The two landed in the yard of a Mokule'ia Estate.

"I talked to the medical examiners, and they said (Hunter) took the brunt of the fall. He knew what was happening, and he took the brunt of it, leaning backwards a little bit, giving her the only chance to survive," Thomas said yesterday in a telephone interview from his mother's home in Blair, Neb.

Thomas said he was watching the tandem pairs jumping from the Cessna 402 some 9,000 feet above him Sunday, watching their parachutes billow open one after another, but then saw a pair of divers whose chute didn't open.

"I watched them go up in the plane, and my wife was asking me how do we know when they jump, and I said look up, and they started jumping one by one," the brother said.

"One by one the chutes open and the last one came out and I was pointing into the air with my finger, and I said, 'There they go, the chute should open any second.'

"I had no idea that it was my sister. I tracked them with my finger, all the way to the horizon, and the chute hadn't opened, and I said I hope that was a cut-away," and that the reserve chute would finally open.

"Even though I saw what I saw, I was in denial and I refused to believe it was my sister," he said.

"I watched the others come down, and I even thought I saw them (his sister and Hunter) from a couple hundred feet."

The other parachutists clambered into a golf cart at the end of the drop zone and returned to the office, and then "one of the skydivers — I don't remember who — said, 'Where's Greg?' and then they all scattered to their vehicles to go and look for him.

"I was still in my camouflage uniform, and I insisted I go with them to look, and they dropped me off in a field of elephant grass, and I spent the next 45 minutes tearing through the tall grass" looking for his sister and the instructor.

Thomas, an infantryman with Company C, 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment at Schofield, said his sister's young son, Kaden, hasn't asked much about his mother, and knows nothing of what happened.

But the boy has been an incredible comfort to the grieving family, he said.

"I can't believe how such a young child can take what everybody is dealing with and turn it around," Thomas said.

"He's acting like a 17-month-old, you know how they can be, and he has kept the whole entire family in constant laughter.

"It's a blessing he doesn't understand what has happened," Thomas said.

But someday, "all of our focus will be to let him know how good a mother she was, a young woman with a hard life, who was working at a hospital and going to nursing school, all while raising him.

"We want to tell him what an angel she was," he said.

Thomas said the head parachute rigger at Drop Zone, George Rivera, told him shortly after the accident that it appeared that the main parachute and the reserve parachute became entangled and wouldn't open even after they were deployed.

Rivera, an FAA certified master rigger and veteran of more than 11,000 jumps, nearly 8,000 of them tandem dives, said that the two chutes were extremely entangled when they were found with the bodies.

That entanglement has led Rivera and others to conclude the main chute lines may have somehow wrapped around one of the two skydivers, he said.

It is impossible to know precisely what took place, he said.

"But we suspect that's what might have happened in this case, that the lines got tangled up with either her or him," he said. That would have made it impossible for Hunter to jettison the main chute, using "cut away" handles designed for that purpose.

When a main chute doesn't open properly, Rivera said, the standard procedure is to pull handles that release it so it won't interfere with the reserve chute when the reserve chute opens.

Rivera said it was clear that Hunter had pulled all five handles that should have disconnected the main chute, but the main chute still didn't disengage. With no options remaining, Hunter apparently attempted to deploy the reserve chute anyway, Rivera said.

But even under those circumstances, Rivera said, the second chute should have opened.

"That's the reason this is so unbelievable, because there's a very good chance that the second chute would clear the main chute and open," he said.

Rivera said he discussed his views with FAA investigator Curtis Whaley yesterday. Whaley could not be reached for comment.

At his wife's insistence, Thomas said he will never skydive again. But he still maintains that skydiving, especially as taught and practiced by his teacher and good friend Hunter, is an exhilarating sport that is safer than driving a car.

There were 35 parachute fatalities in the United States in 2001, and this was the first fatal tandem jump accident in Hawai'i history.

A volunteer Red Cross counselor at the scene was one of the first to assure Thomas he was not to blame, and to warn him he would still feel waves of anguish and guilt, he said. Now, he said, he and his family believe "this is something only God can plan."