Town Mourns Dead Family

The news first arrived by radio to this community of 14,000 people southeast of Edmonton: One of the best-known families in town had been wiped out in one tragic instant, ending what was supposed to be a special Easter vacation at Disneyland.

Don McLaren listened in tearful silence inside his shoe store on the community’s main street.

“This is a god-awful thing that has happened,” he finally said. “He owns the store right next to mine.”

Not only was McLaren’s neighbor, 35-year-old Anthony Deis, dead, but so was Deis’ entire family--his wife Marilyn, 34, and their three daughters, Amanda, 10, Jaclyn, 7, and Kimberly, 5. A private plane with Anthony Deis at the wheel had crashed just after takeoff from John Wayne Airport in Orange County.

Employees at the family’s two jewelry stores in town were so distraught that manager James Cardiff closed shop and went home.

On the sidewalks outside the shops, passers-by knew of the tragedy and talked about it in hushed tones.

At the family’s ranch east of town, the housekeeper cried uncontrollably and was speechless as she watched television news footage of the burned wreckage of her employer’s plane.

Blain Fowler, publisher of the town’s weekly newspaper, said Deis was a “hard worker” who had built up a profitable business. It began when he acquired one of his father-in-law’s jewelry stores. He then built the business up and was, according to a relative, financially comfortable.

“These weren’t poor people,” Fowler said. “They had a multimillion-dollar business going, and Tony would take trips to Antwerp and Buenos Aires just to buy diamonds.”

Frequent Flights

Fowler said Deis had bought his twin-engine, six-seat Piper Aerostar last year to make frequent business and pleasure trips to the United States.

Deis’ brother, Tom, a sergeant for the Medicine Hat City Police in Alberta, said the family had “planned this Easter holiday especially for the kids to go and see Disneyland.”

The occasion also was to be a reunion with Al Porter, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who had driven his family to Orange County from Northern Manitoba, Deis said. Anthony Deis had been an RCMP officer in British Columbia for 2 or 3 years, his brother said.

Porter, his wife and two sons are probably on the road returning home and likely are unaware of the crash, Deis said.

After Anthony Deis’ father-in-law had set him up in the jewelry business with one store in Camrose, Deis had, in recent years, expanded to a second store in Camrose and a third in Lloydminster, Alberta, Tom Deis said.

Comfortably Off

“They were at a point they didn’t have to look back,” Tom Deis said. “He would have been retired by the age of 40.”

He said that as soon as news was broadcast about a Canadian-owned plane crashing in Southern California, fear grew among family members that it might be the Deis family that had died. Tom Deis said he used his police contacts to confirm that the worst had happened.

“My brother was always so careful,” Deis said. “He wouldn’t touch a drink or anything before he was to fly.

“I suppose when it’s your time, it’s your time.”