They were drawn together by the love of taking that first step into nothingness, tumbling into the bright blue sky and soaring.
Skydiving made them family.
The nine skydivers based in Snohomish died along with their pilot after the Cessna 208 Grand Caravan they were in “fell out of the sky” and crashed into the rugged terrain of the Cascade mountains outside of Yakima.
Searchers discovered the wreckage late Monday night. Seven of the victims were found then. The remaining three bodies were found this afternoon, said Nisha Marvel, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.
Families and friends have identified seven of the victims as Casey Craig, 30, of Bothell; Cecil Elsner, 20, of Lake Stevens; Hollie Rasberry, 24, Bellingham; Landon Atkin, 20 of Snohomish; Jeff Ross, 28, of Snohomish; Michelle Barker, 22, of Kirkland and Andrew Smith, 20, of Lake Stevens. Phil Kibler, 46, of Snohomish, was the pilot of the plane. Two others were identified as Ralph Abdo and Bryan Jones.
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.
It was skydiving that bonded the group.
Kelly Craig said he lost more than his brother on the plane. Those who died were “a family,” he said.
“They didn’t die in vain. They died doing what they loved,” said Smith’s girlfriend Julianne Hezlep. “They all had smiles on their faces. They were happy and we need to be happy that they were happy.”
Smith, who has an identical twin brother, Alex, attended Lake Stevens High School. He was working and training to become an engineer on the Victoria Clipper. He was an athlete who ran, played soccer and wrestled. He had tattoos of wings that stretched from his ankles to his calves.
Hezlep, 18, was waiting for Smith to call her on Sunday night. She had been dating him for almost a year. He flew to Idaho to skydive and visit her at Northern Nazarene College in Nampa, Idaho, over the weekend.
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 Hezlep a text message that said “I love you to the end of the world.”
“I waited by that phone and I didn’t hear anything,” she said today, 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 missing.
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 sport is sometimes misunderstood, enthusiasts said. Yet, families of the victims said it wasn’t skydiving that took the lives of the 10 on the plane.
“Skydiving is an educated risk … It’s not as safe as staying in bed, but it’s not what you think it is until you go out and try it … They all made a lot of jumps this weekend and that wasn’t the part that got ‘em,” Kelly Craig said.
Dozens of emotional messages poured onto the MySpace pages of the young people lost in the crash.
Atkin was a 2005 Snohomish High School graduate and was attending Cascadia Community College in Bothell, school officials said.
They described Atkin as an excellent parachute packer, the life of the party and a good friend.
In his spare time, Atkin liked to skydive, snowboard and play music. He listed his father as one of his heroes along with Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and other musicians.
He was part of a three-member pop and punk band, Rumor Has It, which formed in 2004.
Elsner was a student at Western Washington University in Bellingham. His MySpace page illustrates a world of youth and adventure.
It includes a video posting of a base jump that he and friends made off of the 370-foot tall Hoffstadt Creek Bridge near Mount St. Helens in July. Atkin was among the jumpers. The video clip titled “Five Friends, 3 Parachutes, 1 Bridge” is set to upbeat rock and shows the young men standing on the guardrail before diving head-first off of the bridge. He also posted a joyous photo of himself freefalling with red Converse and hiked up cargo pants.
In a poetic essay on skydiving, the young man described skydiving as an escape from a world of turmoil and traffic jams. “… You see the slightest curve of this massive globe looking off into the horizon and get some sense of your place in it all,” he wrote.
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.”
Kibler, the pilot, was raised on the East Coast. He was a parks and forestry worker before he became a pilot about five years ago, said Fred Sand, owner of Skydive Lost Prairie, a skydiving hotspot in Montana.
Helping wildlife observers track fish migration patterns was Kibler’s first job as an aviator. He enjoyed hiking, camping and fishing.
Kibler moved to the Pacific Northwest earlier this year and got a job shuttling skydivers for a living, Sand said.
“As far as his pilot skills, he was great,” Sand said. “He did an excellent job for us when he was here. He was a very likable guy, very easy going, but still very professional as far as his flying.”
Kibler and Sand became friends in the summer of 2006, when Kibler came to work as a pilot for Skydive Lost Prairie. Whenever Sand needed a vacation, he entrusted Kibler to watch over his home and look after his children.
The last time the two saw each other was in August, when Kibler came to Skydive Lost Prairie and made the second jump of his life.
“He enjoyed his jump, but his primary passion was flying, so he devoted himself to that,” Sand said.
Kibler is already missed throughout the skydiving community, as are the others who died in Monday’s crash.
“This is a very trying time for all of us,” Sand said. “Our extended family is rather large, it intertwines throughout the country. I got phone calls starting yesterday when we first became aware of the situation. It’s close to home.”
Elaine Harvey, who runs and manages Skydive Snohomish, said the fatal flight 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.
Family members of the victims were grateful that rescuers found the plane so quickly and praised the efforts of the volunteers that made up the search-and-rescue crews that located the wreckage.
“If it wasn’t for these guys here, I wouldn’t be getting my son back and I want my son back,” said Dennis Craig, Casey Craig’s father.
The searchers found the plane fairly quickly, said Snohomish County sheriff’s chief pilot Bill Quistorf, who assists in search and rescue missions
“It’s really important for families. If they locate the crash right away even if the people are deceased at least the family can know where their loved one are and they aren’t out their suffering,” Quistorf said.
Once the bodies are removed the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration will move in to investigate the crash, Yakima County Sheriff Ken Irwin said during a press conference Tuesday morning.
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 8 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 that 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, and an avid skydiver.
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.
Herald writers Kaitlin Manry, Eric Stevick, David Chircop and Scott Pesznecker contributed to this report.
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