A private airplane returning from the NCAA basketball tournament in Indianapolis crashed in a central Illinois field on Tuesday, killing all seven people on board, including Illinois State University’s associate head basketball coach and a deputy athletics director.
Rescue personnel found no survivors at the site near the city of Bloomington, and a coroner pronounced the seven occupants dead, McLean County Sheriff Jon Sandage said at a news conference.
The plane went down in a soybean field about 4km from the Bloomington airport. All the victims, who were found strapped in their seats, died from blunt force trauma resulting from the crash, coroner Kathleen Davis said.
Illinois State University president Larry Dietz confirmed in an e-mail to students, faculty and staff that associate head basketball coach Torrey Ward, 36, and Aaron Leetch, 37, the athletic department’s deputy director for external relations, were killed in the early morning crash. The e-mail was released to media.
“Words cannot fully express the grief that is felt in the wake of such a tragedy,” Dietz wrote, adding that both men were well-respected and much-loved in the athletics department. “We move between shock and profound sadness.”
Several players and staff carried through with an optional practice on Tuesday afternoon at Redbird Arena. A spokesman said they would not make players or coaches available for comment.
The Cessna 414 twin-engine aircraft took off from Indianapolis and crashed just short of the Central Illinois Regional Airport in Bloomington after midnight, the US Federal Aviation Administration said.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was investigating, but there was no initial word on the cause of the crash. News photographs from near the scene showed dense fog.
The airport was open and all systems, including its runway lighting, were functioning, although the tower had closed several hours earlier and handed responsibility to an air traffic control facility in Peoria.
Radar contact was lost moments before the crash, and a search was launched when the pilot failed to close out his flight plan. It took about three hours to find the wreckage.
NTSB investigator Todd Fox said the plane was cleared to land in fog and rain, but appears to have made a turn away from approaching the runway before crashing. It is not clear why, he said.
Fox said he does not know if the plane was having problems or the pilot radioed in distress. Its engines caught fire on impact, Fox said.
The pilot had flown about 12,000 hours and held an air transport license, which allows a pilot to fly commercial airliners, Fox said. He said the full NTSB investigation is expected to take a year to 18 months.
The other victims included Scott Bittner, a 42-year-old business owner whose father owned the airplane; Terry Stralow, 64, a sports bar owner; pilot Thomas Hileman, 51; and Andrew Butler, 40, an employee of Sprint, authorities said.
Jason Jones, 45, a former basketball and baseball player for Illinois Wesleyan University who worked at Wells Fargo Advisors, also died.
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