The worst has been confirmed for the families of nine people from a Snohomish skydiving club and the pilot of the plane that crashed in the Cascade Range near Yakima.
“We found no survivors at this time,” Yakima County Sheriff Ken Irwin said during a press conference Tuesday morning.
Rescuers began the grim task of recovering the bodies of those aboard the Cessna 208 Grand Caravan that was discovered Monday night near White Pass.
As of this morning, seven bodies have been found. Searchers found the remaining three bodies later today.
Families and friends gathered around Irwin at a press conference Tuesday. They had kind words for those who searched through the night to find the wrecked plane.
“If it wasn’t for these guys here, I wouldn’t be getting my son back and I want my son back,” Dennis Craig said.
Casey Craig, 30, of Bothell, was aboard the Cessna Air Caravan and is believed to among those who died in the crash, his family said.
His parents, brother and sister gathered at the operations base.
Kelly Craig said he lost more than his brother on the plane. Those who died were “a family,” he said.
The skydivers aboard were part of Skydive Snohomish, including some employees.
Based at Harvey Airfield in Snohomish, the company made the airfield one of the best-known skydiving centers in the state, with 14,500 jumps annually.
Seattle-area resident Phil Kibler was the pilot of the plane. Kibler was raised on the East Coast and used to work outdoors as a parks and forestry worker, said Fred Sand, a friend of Kibler who owns Skydive Lost Prairie in Montana.
Kibler became a pilot about five years ago, helping wildlife observers to track fish migration patterns, Sand said.
Friends of Kibler describe him as a great pilot.
Friends of Landon Atkin, 20 of Snohomish; Jeff Ross, 28, of Snohomish; Cecil Elsner, 20, of Lake Stevens; and Michelle Barker,. 22, of Kirkland and Andrew Smith, 20, of Lake Stevens, reported them among the victims.
Smith has an identical twin brother, Alex. He attended Lake Stevens High School and was working and training to become an engineer on the Victoria Clipper. He was an athlete who ran, played soccer and wrestled and he was an avid skydiver. He had tattoos of wings that stretched from his ankles to his calves.
Lake Stevens resident Julianne Hezlep, 18, paid a visit to Harvey Field this morning to lay a dozen white roses in an area where spectators would watch skydivers jump. The roses were tied with a blue ribbon, Andrew Smith’s favorite color.
She had been dating Smith for almost a year. He flew to Idaho to skydive and visit her at Northern Nazarene College in Nampa, Idaho, over the weekend. She spent the weekend hanging out and enjoying a bonfire with Smith and his skydivers who she also knew.
Hezlep said she watched the plane take off from Boise. Official accounts have placed the time of take-off close to 7 p.m., but Hezlep said she watched it take off closer to 6 p.m., later than originally scheduled, to avoid the storm.
While he was on board the plane, Smith sent her a text message to Hezlep that said “I love you to the end of the world.”
“They didn’t die in vain. They died doing what they loved,” Hezlep said. “They all had smiles on their faces. They were happy and we need to be happy that they were happy.”
Hezlep was waiting for Smith to call her on Sunday night.
“I waited by that phone and I didn’t hear anything,” Hezlep said, crying and hugging her mother, Daphne. . “I called him at 10 and I called him at 11 and I called him at 12 and I called him at 1 and no one answered and I fell asleep staring at my computer screen.”
Hezlep woke up Monday morning, turned on the television and didn’t see anything about a plane crash. She thought everything must be OK, but she tried calling again and he still didn’t answer so she called Skydive Snohomish and someone there told her the plane was lost.
Until that point, she had tried not to worry.
“You don’t worry when you are dating a skydiver,” she said. “They do it and they are OK.” .
The Bellingham Herald reported that Hollie Rasberry, 24, also was aboard the plane. The avid skydiver had been an employee at Billy McHale’s Restaurant in Bellingham for four years.
The restaurant’s owner, Kristy Knopp, said Rasberry fell in love with sky diving when she first tried it more than a year ago.
“She picked up every extra shift she could just so she could go sky diving because it was so expensive,” Knopp said. “She’s such a fun-loving person.”
Elaine Harvey, who runs and manages Skydive Snohomish, said it wasn’t a Skydive Snohomish trip, but that all of the people on board were licensed skydivers who considered Skydive Snohomish their home drop zone.
“It’s not something you can comprehend,” she said. “The pain is unimaginable. We lost 10 of our closest friends.”
She thought about the public perception of skydiving.
“Aviation is our lives, but it is statistically safer to skydive than to commute to work and to do a lot of the other things we do on a regular basis,” she said. “So it doesn’t change our perception of anything aviation related. This is a tragic accident.”
Rescuers expect that it could take a couple of days to remove the remains from the mountain.
Once the bodies are removed the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration will move in to investigate the crash, Irwin said.
The debris field is about 100 feet by 60 feet. It appears that the plane went straight down and was traveling at least 70 mph, Irwin said. The wreckage was found about 200 yards southeast of the last radar signal it emitted, he said.
It’s about two miles from the Yakima County and Lewis County line in rough terrain near Rimrock Lake west of Yakima.
The plane left Star, Idaho, near Boise, to Shelton, in Mason County on Sunday.
It was ferrying the skydivers between Idaho and Washington, according to Keri Farrington, a manager at Kapowsin Air Sports of Shelton. The company owns the plane but was renting it to the event organizer, Skydive Boise, for use over the weekend.
It’s unlikely the skydivers were wearing their parachutes because it was a long flight. They would have been wearing seatbelts.
A hunter reported to authorities on Sunday that he heard a plane go overhead about 9 p.m. The hunter said the plane seemed to be straining and he heard a crash a short time later.
Yakima County sheriff’s deputies received a report of an overdo plane about 2 a.m. Monday and began to organize a search.
Monday night a search crew on the ground followed the smell of fuel to the crashed plane.
Kapowsin Air Sports, a family-owned company that is more than 60 years old, has never lost a plane, said Geoff Farrington, Kapowsin’s co-owner.
The downed Cessna also had never experienced mechanical problem, he said.
Jim Hall, Yakima County’s director of emergency management, has been the liaison with families who converged at White Pass Lodge.
“They’re a great group of people going through a horrendous tragedy,” Hill said Tuesday morning.
He said he has heard the families and friends of the skydivers as “adrenaline junkies, who lived life to the fullest and enjoyed what they did,” Hall said.
“They were doing what they wanted to do and I think we can appreciate that,” he said.
The skydivers made a lot of jumps over the weekend, said Kelly Craig, the brother of Casey Craig.
His family rushed to Yakima before the wreckage was discovered.
“We were wanting to help,” Kelly Craig said. “Now we know so the healing hopeful begins now.”
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