The State - News from Dec. 11, 1985

The wife of Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, director of President Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan and former chief of NASA’s space shuttle program, and two other people were killed when a light plane crashed on a 10,000-foot mountain about eight miles west of South Lake Tahoe, the Pentagon said. Barbara Jean Northcutt Abrahamson, 45, was aboard the single-engine plane on a flight from South Lake Tahoe to Tracy on Sunday when it went down on Pyramid Peak in the Desolation Wilderness. Her brother was believed to have been the pilot, and his wife was reported to have been the other passenger. Signals from an emergency locater transmitter enabled searchers to drop a member of the 129th Air Rescue Group from Moffett Field Naval Air Station to the wreck from a helicopter, but removal of the bodies was not immediately possible because of bad weather, and confirmation of the identities of the victims was delayed.