Niles couple awaits word from son

Shawn Coursen is a cryptographer who has served 11 years in the Navy.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
NILES -- James and Susan Coursen are still waiting to hear from their son, Shawn, who was one of 24 Americans aboard the U.S. Navy surveillance plane that made an emergency landing Sunday at a Chinese military base.
The plane was forced to land after being damaged in a midair collision with a Chinese fighter jet.
Shawn Coursen, 28, joined the Navy 11 years ago, immediately after graduating from Valdosta (Ga.) High School. He is a cryptographer (code decipherer) with a high-level security clearance, who can't say much about his work, his father said from his Warren Avenue home late Monday evening.
Little information: Mrs. Coursen received a call from a Navy official about 8 a.m. Monday, telling her that her son was aboard the plane and that all its occupants were reported to be safe.
"That's all they would say," Coursen said. "We haven't heard anything since then. The only thing we've heard is what was on CNN. They told us to watch CNN, and we'd find out more that way," he said of the Navy man who called. "I just wish they'd all come home safely."
The Coursens were to be picked up at 5 a.m. today from their Niles home and driven to an ABC-TV affiliate in Cleveland, from which they were to appear live for five to 10 minutes this morning on "Good Morning America."
As of late Monday, Chinese officials were still holding the plane's crew incommunicado on the Chinese island of Hainan, but a U.S. State Department spokesman reported that the Chinese said U.S. officials were to have access to the crew today.
Background: Shawn lives in northern Japan with his wife, Misayo, and their 5-year-old daughter, Jessika.
He was a runner on the high school track team and has enjoyed baseball card collecting since his childhood. He has played soccer and baseball while in the Navy. He never lived in Niles, but last visited his parents in Niles in summer 1999.
He excelled on the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the seventh grade, but the Coursens refused to let him skip grades because they thought he wasn't mature enough to do that.
The Navy asked Shawn to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., but he declined, and the Navy put him through a bachelor's degree program at another college, his father said.
"What he did, he always made sure he finished, no matter what," Mrs. Coursen said of her son.
His parents returned to the Mahoning Valley nine years ago from Valdosta. Coursen had graduated from St. Mary's High School in Warren and his wife from Niles McKinley High School.
One crew member is from Ashtabula County. She is Navy Aviation Machinist 2nd Class Wendy Westbrook of Rock Creek .
Westbrook joined the Navy after graduating from Jefferson High School in the mid-1990s, according to her high school history teacher.