Plane Wreckage Pulled From Sea; 3rd-Person Mystery Remains

Huddled together on the Newport Beach Pier Friday, Lucy and Gerald O’Grady of Michigan watched as wreckage of a plane crash that killed their 25-year-old daughter was floated to the surface of the sea.

“When you lose someone, you have to know why,” Lucy O’Grady said of the death of their daughter, Sandra L. O’Grady. “People have always told me that, but now I know what it means.”

O’Grady, a cocktail waitress of Huntington Beach, died of massive head and body injuries when the Cessna 152 plunged into the ocean early Tuesday a quarter-mile offshore and a few hundred yards from the pier. Her boyfriend, Richard Michael Brownell, a 27-year-old landscaper of Anaheim, also died in the crash.

Their bodies were found in the submerged cockpit of the plane. Neither of them knew how to fly a plane, authorities and friends of the couple said, a point that has mystified investigators.

Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Dick Olson said the three-diver salvage crew found no evidence of a third victim in the crash, a student pilot who had been seen leaving a Westminster restaurant with the couple just hours before their deaths.

The pilot, Kevin Lee Eisiminger, 30, has been missing since the crash and failed to show up for work Monday night. Eisiminger, a McDonnell Douglas parts inspector, was a member of The Flying Club, a group of private pilots that had been leasing the plane for its members’ use; as a member, he had access to the plane’s keys. His car was found parked near the plane’s tie-down spot at John Wayne Airport.

A salvage crew early Friday lifted the crumpled plane off the ocean floor with air bags and towed it--or four pieces of it--to a boat ramp at nearby Newport Dunes, where the parents quietly questioned crew members. They asked about whether a third victim had been found.

Dave Miller, owner of the salvage company, said divers videotaped the wreckage and the removal of the plane from the water. There was “no way” to tell from the plane remains how many passengers may have been on board, he added.

One of the plane’s two seats was found outside the wreckage and away from the cockpit, Miller said.

Diver Jason Downs said two of the plane’s doors, the tail, a wing and the engine were fanned out in all directions, 20 feet from the fuselage.

In their private search of the plane parts, the grieving parents found their daughter’s gold necklace in the tangled engine and dashboard. Divers for the salvage company said they retrieved a pair of black pumps from the wreckage, which one salvager said “looked like (the shoes) had been through a trash compactor.”

Lucy and Gerald O’Grady said they flew from their home in Bloomfield on Wednesday when they heard about the crash. Both parents spoke with their daughter last Saturday and were planning to fly out this month to meet Michael Brownell, her new “friend,” Lucy O’Grady said.

The plane parts were trucked to National Aircraft Part Sales in Long Beach, where they will be inspected by a National Transportation and Safety Board official, according to Robert Cheek, an independent adjuster who watched the salvage from his own boat.

Meanwhile, Sandra O’Grady’s body was cremated Friday, her mother said.

“We’re leaving half of her here and bringing half (back) to Michigan,” Lucy O’Grady said. “She loved California and she loved the beach; our selfish part wants her in Michigan.” Christie O’Grady of Huntington Beach, who joined her parents during the plane salvaging, said her older sister had never mentioned Brownell or Eisiminger, but she recalled Sandra’s impulsiveness and free spirit. Sandra, she said, often did things on the spur of the moment.

“Somebody would say, ‘Let’s go to Las Vegas,’ and she’d say, ‘Let’s go!’,” Christie O’Grady said emotionally.

Sandra “enjoyed life in a manner that was unplanned,” Gerald O’Grady said Friday of his daughter. “We never passed judgment one way or the other.”