Kenya Plane Crash Kills 14

A chartered aircraft carrying an extended family to a game reserve plowed into Mt. Kenya, killing all 12 American tourists and the two South African pilots on board, officials said Sunday.

The twin-engine Fairchild turboprop hit Point Lenana, one of three peaks on Africa’s second-highest mountain, as a cloudy sky was beginning to clear just before sunset Saturday, said Bongo Woodley, senior Kenya Wildlife Service warden in charge of Mount Kenya National Park.

“We heard it immediately, and I have flown over the site and seen the crash, and there do not appear to be any survivors,” Woodley said by telephone from the park headquarters in Naro Moru, 75 miles north of Nairobi.

Rangers based below the crash site found no survivors when they visited it late Saturday but recovered eight U.S. passports, Woodley said.

In Atlanta, the Rev. P.C. Enniss Jr. at Trinity Presbyterian Church said he had spent much of the day with the victims’ relatives.

He gave the names of the dead as: Dr. George W. Brumley, 68; his wife, Jean, 67; three of their children, George III and daughters Lois and Beth; Beth’s husband, William Love, and their daughter Sarah, 12.

Other victims included Julia Brumley, wife of George Brumley III, and their two children, George IV and Jordan.

Lois Brumley Morrell’s husband, Richard Morrell, was among those killed, the Asheville, N.C., Citizen-Times reported early today. Their son Alex also was killed in the crash.

“They’re just in total shock, as everyone in the church family is,” Enniss said of the victims’ relatives. “These people were the heart of Trinity Presbyterian Church as much as anybody else.”

In Kenya, senior police and civil aviation officials on Sunday visited the area where the plane slammed into the mountain at 16,000 feet, but could not reach certain parts of the site because of bad weather and difficult terrain, Kabira said.

Another attempt to recover the bodies was to be made today.

Peter Wakahia, a Kenyan civil aviation official, said the aircraft had been “completely destroyed” and that debris was scattered on two rock outcrops on either side of the point of impact.

Point Lenana, at 16,450 feet, is the lowest of the mountain’s three peaks.

The plane departed from Lanseria airport near Johannesburg and reportedly was heading for Kenya’s Buffalo Springs National Reserve, 135 miles north of Nairobi, the capital.