4 Buena Park Businessmen Die in Small-Plane Crash

Four Buena Park businessmen returning from a Kiwanis meeting near Arizona were killed Thursday morning when their single-engine plane plummeted into a marshy bank on the Colorado River.

Herbert Folsom, a Buena Park dentist who watched his friends take off and then crash just a few minutes later, said, “There’s just such an emptiness to see the plane go down like that and not be able to pull it up.”

San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department officials did not release the names of the dead. But Folsom and other Kiwanis members identified them as: the pilot, Rick Fosnight, 47, who lived in Newport Beach and owned a McDonald’s franchise in Buena Park; Marcel LaFont, 86, a retired optometrist in Buena Park; Gerald Laub, in his early 50s, a semi-retired businessman who lived in Big Bear and owned several bars in Buena Park and elsewhere in northern Orange County; and Joe Maertz, 68, of Buena Park, who owned a locksmith shop.

One of Fosnight’s two daughters was to be married this weekend, a fellow Kiwanis member said.

All four men had been past officers in the club and active in civic projects and fund-raising drives, fellow members said. LaFont founded both the Buena Park and La Palma chapters of the Kiwanis, officials said.

“They were the type of people that I could call on twice a month, for instance, to clean one of the parks here in town. They were the stalwarts you looked to when you were short of help,” said Wally Miller, president of the Buena Park Kiwanis chapter.

Miller said he found out about the crash shortly before his chapter’s regularly scheduled noon meeting on Wednesday.

“I had the duty of going in and telling everybody we had just lost four of our best members,” Miller said. “It went downhill from the beginning. There were a great deal of tears and a great deal of shock.”

According to a statement from San Bernardino sheriff’s officials, the crash occurred about 10:45 a.m. near the Riverland Resort, about 5 miles north of the city of Parker on the California side of the Colorado River. The site is about 10 miles south of the Parker Dam.

The four men were returning from an overnight “interclub” that allowed them to sit in on meetings of two Kiwanis clubs in the Parker area, sharing ideas for community projects and fund-raising ideas, said Folsom, the witness to the crash who also took part in the meetings.

Along with their Kiwanis meetings, Folsom said, the men had gone boating, watched movies and “sat around talking and just watched the sunset with friends.”

With Fosnight flying his plane, they had traveled to Parker Wednesday and were returning Thursday morning to Fullerton Municipal Airport, Folsom said.

He recalled loading a new roll of film into his camera and giving it to the men to take with them so they could take an overhead shot. Folsom left them at the airport and returned to a second house he has a few miles from the airport. From there, about 20 minutes later, he watched as the plane flew overhead.

Watching from his house, Folsom recalled seeing the plane begin a quick left turn, heading west. Then he heard the engine begin to give out--not all at once, but slowly, Folsom said. “As they banked, they went real steep, so the wings were almost straight up and down--it looked as if the plane was upside down. That’s what I thought looking at it. And it went down into a dive, coming down at about a 45-degree angle. . . .

“It just went right on down, and there’s some kind of marshland on the California side, with cattails going, and there was a big splash when (the plane) came in,” Folsom recalled.

Folsom couldn’t get across the river to the crash site for about half an hour, he said. Once there, he heard the bad news from someone else at the scene.

“The way it looked like they landed, I thought there was a chance they could survive, but none of them did,” Folsom said. “I just can’t believe it. I’m still numb--it’s like a bad dream.”

The Sheriff’s Department said deputies arriving at the scene waded in knee-deep water out to the wreckage to discover the four occupants dead. Investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board were called to the scene.

Cliff Rothrock, an Anaheim school district administrator who heads the northern Orange County Kiwanis division, broke the news Thursday evening to chapter leaders from around the area gathered for a regular meeting.

“Everybody was shocked,” he said. “The meetings are usually fun and joking around but it wasn’t that tonight. It was terrible.”

The daughter of Joe Maertz, who did not want to give her name, said her family had heard of the father’s death from a friend, but said they had few details on the accident.

Times staff writer Geoff Bouchier contributed to this report.