12 Killed in Sky Divers’ Plane Crash

A plane carrying 11 members of a sky-diving school crashed into a house and exploded Sunday, killing everyone aboard and a man sitting on his back porch.

The house caught fire, but authorities said no one else was injured in the row of about 10 houses along a woodsy lane.

Mattie Byrd was in bed when she heard the plane laboring overhead: “I . . . saw the plane in the air, and it turned like it wanted to go back the other way, then it made a nose dive.

“I was assuming it was coming in the back door of my house. It sounded like it was going through something, and then it went boom . By the time we got outside, it had blown and there was fire everywhere.”

A body count at the scene confirmed that there were 11 people on the plane, said Mary Evans, a state police spokeswoman. She said the names of the victims would not be released until today.

Byrd said that her neighbor, Vincent Harris, who owned a trucking company and moonlighted as a Baptist minister, was killed but that his son, Vincent Jr., who is 8 or 9, was playing outside and was not injured.

“Right after the crash, there were a couple of people who tried to get in there to get him, but they couldn’t. It was all in flames,” she said. The fire melted the vinyl siding on her house, about 50 feet from the Harris home.

The Beechcraft Queen Air BE-65 went down around 6:45 p.m. about 40 miles east of Richmond. It crashed about 15 minutes after takeoff from West Point Municipal Airport, said Arlene Salac, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

The pilot and parachutists were from a sky-diving school at the airport, which is about 1 1/2 miles from the crash site, Evans said.

The seats in the twin-engine plane had been removed so it could carry as many as 12 people for sky diving, Salac said.