A small plane crashed in dense fog in a Tierrasanta neighborhood early Thursday morning, presumably killing all six people on board, injuring eight people on the ground and burning several cars and homes in military housing.
The Cessna 550 Citation II apparently clipped a power line before going down about 2 miles from Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport around 3:45 a.m., according to federal authorities. A music industry agent and a drummer appeared to be among the dead.
The plane carved a path of destruction down a residential street in the Murphy Canyon community, leaving several cars on fire, causing a gaping hole in a corner duplex, and sending the home’s terrified family scrambling to escape.
The Federal Aviation istration said six people were aboard the Cessna. San Diego police said late Thursday afternoon that two fatalities have been confirmed, “though the exact number of deceased is still being determined.”
About 100 people were evacuated from the neighborhood, just west of Santo Road, southeast of Interstate 15 and Aero Drive. Most of the injured were treated for minor injuries at the evacuation center, but one was taken to a hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation.
Fragments of the aircraft — pieces yet to be identified — were located underneath the power lines, said Elliott Simpson, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board.
A wing from the plane was found in the road at the crash scene. Simpson also said it’s likely the plane had a flight data recorder.
San Diego Fire-Rescue Department Assistant Chief Dan Eddy told reporters the crash left “a gigantic debris field” in the densely packed neighborhood. He said all the fires were extinguished within a few hours, save for “one stubborn car fire” that refused to be doused.
Thick fog blanketed the area, creating only about a half-mile of visibility at the time of the crash, according to the National Weather Service. Air traffic radio transmissions indicate the pilot was concerned about the conditions as he approached the Kearny Mesa airport.
Authorities are working to identify the deceased and have not said who they suspect was piloting the plane. The aircraft is ed to an Alaska-based company owned by music agent Dave Shapiro, who is a certified pilot, according to FAA records.
Shapiro worked for years as a music agent at large Los Angeles firms United Talent Agency and The Agency Group. In 2018, he founded Sound Talent Group in San Diego.
His agency issued a statement Thursday confirming Shapiro had been killed. The company also told The Associated Press that two other employees were also on board.
Among those believed to have been on the plane was Daniel Williams, the former drummer for Ohio metal band The Devil Wears Prada. Williams had posted several Instagram stories in the hours before the crash showing the Cessna as well as him in the co-pilot seat next to Shapiro.
Low visibility
The plane departed from Teterboro, N.J., on Wednesday, according to Flightaware.com. It stopped in Wichita, Kan., where it refueled before leaving on the three-hour flight to San Diego.
Montgomery Field did not file a weather report Thursday morning, the National Weather Service said. The automated weather observation report pilots tune into over the air traffic control frequency was “missing” or “not available,” according to radio traffic at the time of the crash.
As the plane approached the San Diego region, the pilot asked for the weather report out of Montgomery-Gibbs. The air traffic controller for Southern California Approach responded, in audio recorded by LiveATC.net, that the automated weather report at that field was out of service.
The pilot asked again a few minutes later, saying he had checked the conditions at Gillespie Field in El Cajon.
“I just wanted to know if you had any idea on the weather. I got the Gillespie weather, but as I’m sure you know, sometimes it can be dramatically different between Gillespie and Montgomery,” the pilot told the controller. “According to Gillespie, it’s pretty much down to minimum, so I just want to see what I’m in for here.”
The traffic controller came back with the weather report out of Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, indicating visibility of half a mile and a cloud ceiling of 200 feet.
“Alright, uh, doesn’t sound great, but we’ll give it a go,” the pilot responded. He then asked about the conditions at Brown Field in Otay Mesa, just in case. The pilot’s reaction to those conditions: “Not a great option either.”
The pilot continued to head for Montgomery-Gibbs.
Around 3:45 a.m., the pilot announced over the Montgomery-Gibbs tower frequency that the plane was about 3 miles away on final approach.
‘Heat all over my body’
Ben McCarty woke to the sound of his wife’s screams, followed by an explosion.
“I saw orange and I felt heat all over my body,” he said.
His living room, littered with debris, was on fire. His roof was gone. “I could see the night sky.” He and his wife, Srujana McCarty, grabbed their two sleeping children to flee through the backyard of their Salmon Street duplex. They couldn’t find a way to get out.
Five houses down Salmon Street, a jet roar and a boom jarred Gilbert Gonzalez from sleep. His house shook. His wife saw a flash.
Gonzalez quickly dressed, slipped on flip-flops and ran outside. “You could see the entire strip of flames across the street,” he said.
McCarty’s home, he said, “was just demolished.” McCarty’s truck, which had been parked on a side street, had been hit by the plane and pushed into the home’s living room.
Gonzalez, a firefighter on a Navy ship, grabbed a ladder and draped it over McCarty’s back fence. Someone handed Gonzalez two small children and he carried them to a nearby home.
“We were able to climb and our kids over,” McCarty recalled. “My wife got over. I ed both of our dogs over, and then I went out.”
Crews arrive to chaos
The first fire crews to arrive at Salmon Street found dense fog, a house on fire and several cars also ablaze, according to Eddy, the assistant fire chief.
“When it hit the street, as the jet fuel went down, it took out every single car that was on both sides of the street,” Eddy said of the plane. “You can see that every single car was burning down both sides of the street.”
A burned-out truck, which may have been propelled off the street, sat in front of a home with a gaping hole. Evacuations began immediately.
“It’s 3:45 in the morning. Our worry was the fact that people are home,” Eddy said. “We started initiating the fire attack while at the same time going inside each structure … and ensuring that they were cleared out.”
He said fire officials “are going to throw the world at this, too. We’re going to bring every medical unit that we can and every engine that we can.”
San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said about 50 police officers responded immediately to a “pretty horrific” scene.
“To see the police officers and firefighters, to run in there, start trying to evacuate people out of the way,” he said, “doing anything and everything they could to try to save somebody’s life is really heroic.”
Less than an hour after the crash, authorities called in the San Diego Humane Society to help with animals at the crash site, agency spokesperson Nina Thompson said. Dogs were taken to two Humane Society campuses, where workers in hazardous material suits bathed and decontaminated them.
As of 7:30 p.m., the group had taken in 36 pets for emergency boarding and one dog as an owner surrender.
‘We are in this together’
The Santo Terrace development, a collection of duplexes that are one and two stories tall in the Murphy Canyon area, is military housing. San Diego Naval Base commander Capt. Robert Healy said the “foremost concern right now is to make sure that we have the safety of our families who reside in the neighborhood.”
Philip Rizzo, CEO of Liberty Military Housing, which manages the properties, estimated 40 to 50 families would be displaced until the investigation finished. Of those, maybe 15 to 20 families may need to be rehoused.
Some residents who evacuated from their homes, many still clad in pajamas, gathered in the Navy Exchange parking lot early Thursday, where they were approached by volunteers and people offering water, food, diapers and other supplies.
“As soon as we learned what had happened, my husband and I, we started gathering food and water for folks,” said Lisa Monroe, a neighborhood resident. “All the teachers and everyone are helping out, coming together to help.”
Hours after helping a neighbor get out, Gonzalez stood in the Navy Exchange parking lot, talking with fellow evacuees.
“It is unreal,” he told a reporter. “We are in the flight line of this airport. We see these things coming over our houses every day. And you think about it — what if it just dropped one day? Never thought it would actually happen this way.”
Prior deadly crashes
When 52-year-old David Rusk saw the news of the crash from his Austin, Texas, home Thursday, he was transported back to a horrifying night as a boy in San Diego.
On Nov. 11, 1983, a 10-year-old Rusk had been in his family’s Salmon Street home when a fireball suddenly erupted in the backyard.
Pilot Thomas Lessard was trying to land his single-engine plane at Montgomery-Gibbs during a storm that night. During a second attempt, he struck a power line 10,000 feet from the runway, according to the NTSB’s report of the incident.
The plane slid 400 feet across a field, tumbled over the street and crashed into Rusk’s yard. The child watched stunned as neighbors pulled a badly injured Lessard from the plane.
Lessard died at a hospital. His three engers also died.
“The odds that it’s in the same spot are mind-boggling,” Rusk said.
Thursday’s crash was reminiscent of a December 2021 crash near El Cajon that killed two pilots and two nurses aboard a medical transport jet that went down in a residential neighborhood a little east of Gillespie Field. Similar to Thursday’s crash, the air ambulance was trying to land in poor weather and struck power lines before slamming into a neighborhood. Nobody on the ground was injured.
Just two months prior, in October 2021, a doctor flying from his job in Arizona to his home in San Diego crashed in a Santee neighborhood while trying to reach Montgomery-Gibbs. The doctor died, as did a UPS driver whose truck was struck; a couple in their 70s were rescued from one of the two homes destroyed in the crash.
In 2017, a plane experienced engine trouble just after taking off from Montgomery-Gibbs and crash-landed in an empty school playground before skidding into a Clairemont home. The wreck killed two engers on the plane and destroyed the home.
Staff writers Alex Riggins, Lucas Robinson, Gary Robbins and Phillip Molnar contributed to this report.
