Trip Ended With Tragedy for 2 Teens

The plan seemed harmless enough.

Tyson Stearns and his best friend, Erik Lind, both 18, decided to rent a small plane Friday and fly--with Lind, a licensed pilot, at the controls--to Santa Ynez to lunch with Stearns’ grandmother. Then they planned to stop and see a mutual friend in Santa Barbara before heading home to Huntington Beach.

All went well until the final leg, when sometime after lifting off in foggy darkness from Santa Barbara’s airport Friday night the plane crashed into the rugged mountains north of Ventura.

Both young men were killed.

Stearns’ mother, Gail Stearns, human resources manager at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, said the two friends had flown together before without incident.

She said the family became concerned late Friday when her son did not return as scheduled. The crash site was discovered about 9:45 a.m. Saturday, after the family spent a sleepless night worrying.

Investigators found the plane about the time Sterns normally would have been out on a golf course with his father, an adult education teacher in the ABC Unified School District in Cerritos, she said.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were looking into the cause of the crash Sunday, a spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said. Officials for the federal agency could not be reached Sunday for comment.

Stearns was enrolled as a freshman at Orange Coast College, though his plans for the future were still ambiguous, the mother said.

“He was one of those ‘undecideds,’ ” she said. “He just wanted to get his [associate’s degree] first then transfer. Or maybe decide school wasn’t for him and maybe join the Air Force, or the Navy.”

She said her son worked at a local Lucky supermarket at Magnolia Street and Atlanta Avenue for two years. He recently had earned his second promotion in customer service in the meat department.

“He called in sick one day out of the two years,” she said.

In addition to his parents, Stearns is survived by a sister, Tanya, 21, a student at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo.

Plans were being made for a funeral service Wednesday in Santa Ynez, Gail Stearns said.