SANFORD, Fla. — Before neighbors realized that a plane had crashed into two homes Tuesday, they saw a 10-year-old boy engulfed in flames jump out a second-story window.
"He was in shock. He didn't say anything. He didn't cry. He didn't blink," said Antonio Rivera, 24, a neighbor who said he and others threw wet blankets on the severely burned boy just after the crash in this Orlando suburb.
Investigators will spend today digging through engine parts, wing pieces and airplane doors strewn among backyard grills and wicker furniture to figure out why the pilot of a small plane reported smoke before flying into the homes.
Aboard the Cessna 310 were Michael Klemm, 56, a pilot for NASCAR Aviation and Dr. Bruce Kennedy, the husband of a NASCAR scion. It was not entirely clear who was flying the plane. NASCAR said it was Kennedy, but investigators said earlier Tuesday it was Klemm.
Also dead are 4-year-old Gabriela Dechat, 6-month-old Joseph Louis Woodard and her mother, Janice Joseph Woodard, 24.
All three were killed when the plane slammed into two houses, touching off a fire that left only a few metal studs remaining on the second floor of one house. The fire was still smoldering Tuesday evening, giving the neighborhood a charred smell.
Gabriela's parents were both injured, critically in the case of father Peter Dechat. The 10-year-old boy who suffered severe burns was not identified. Police said he was flown to the Cincinnati Burn Center. An off-duty firefighter who helped with the rescue was being treated for smoke inhalation but his injuries were not serious.
Neighbor Rocky Otero said his family often saw the 10-year-old boy playing in the backyard with a ball and a neighborhood German shepherd.
The westbound plane, en route from Daytona Beach, Fla., and scheduled to land in Lakeland, Fla., clipped the tops of oak trees that served as a perimeter to this new subdivision of about 300 homes. The crash site is about three miles from Sanford-Orlando International Airport, where the pilot was attempting to land after reporting smoke in the cockpit.
The earth-toned homes in The Preserve at Lake Monroe, next to the city zoo, all look strikingly similar, reminding neighbors who wandered around later Tuesday with their dogs and children that it could have been anyone's home.
"It is a freak accident," said Sanford's Deputy Police Chief Darrel Presley. "It was just a horrific scene."
Still, Presley noted that only one other home had significant debris damage: "It could have been a lot worse."
The 911 tape released by police is short and urgent, with an apparently older woman shouting simultaneously to a dispatcher and to bystanders: "Get away from the house. It's two houses! Get away from the houses! The houses are on fire!"
The crash happened between 8:30 and 9 in the morning, when many people had gone to work. Otero, who now has an airplane door in his backyard, said his wife was sleeping while he wasat work. She heard a boom and felt heat from her window. "She thought my brother turned on the heater," Otero said.
His wife woke the other relatives in the house, some of whom had heard and felt a shattering boom, but weren't quite sure what to make of it.
Elliot Feliciano, 43, who lives a few blocks away, was outside changing the oil in his car. He thought the boom was a train that sometimes rumbles along a set of nearby tracks. "When I looked in the sky, I saw a big cloud of smoke," he said.
As news unfolded, he remembered a meeting a few months ago between the neighborhood association and the police chief todebate whether to reduce the speed limit.
"He said, `You guys are lucky,'" Feliciano recalled. "`Nothing has ever happened in this community.'"
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