The People Side of a Fatal Crash
An excellent article about a recent crash that killed three people.
Couple that befriended crew before fatal crash hopes to contact families
By DEBORAH BUCKHALTER
Jackson County Floridan
Friday, January 6, 2006
Last Saturday night Steve Egee saw a helicopter land in the yard of his home church, situated just 400 yards or so from his house near Brewton, Ala.
A volunteer firefighter, Egee figured it might be a craft on a medical mission and walked over to see if he could assist the crew.
Three men emerged from the red and white R44 Astro. They'd landed to wait out a heavy fog, the pilot said.
With little open at 10 p.m. on New Year's Eve in tiny Brewton, Egee invited them to his place for a home-cooked meal and offered to put the pilot and his two passengers up for the night.
They had supper with the Egee family, but declined an offer to stay overnight in his in-laws' vacant motor home.
Instead, Egee drove them 20 minutes or so to the hotel his wife, Robbie, had searched out and arranged for them to stay in.
They'd had a nice visit with the family before they departed, and had contacted their parties to let them know they would be a bit delayed and that they planned to start out again the next day.
Egee felt good when he heard the pilot tell someone on the other end of the phone that they were being well taken care of where they were.
Egee said he learned from the pilot that he was delivering the helicopter to its owner in south Florida, having departed from a town in Louisiana.
They also chatted about various other things, becoming fast friends in the few hours they spent together that evening.
The next morning, Egee drove back to the motel, picked them up, and took them back to the helicopter in the church yard.
The pilot waited on the morning fog to lift, and then for Egee's preacher to release the congregation because he didn't want to disturb the service with a noisy lift-off.
Besides, there were some pint-sized fans he wanted to meet and greet.
After church, the children poured out of the sanctuary at Pine View Holiness Church, fascinated with the helicopter and its crew.
The three men were all too glad to indulge their curiosity and posed for pictures with their host community.
Brewton and its smaller outlying community of Pineview are located about an hour north of Pensacola, where an unexpected helicopter dropping down for a visit can cause a stir.
As he left, the pilot promised to take an aerial photograph of the church and send it back to the congregation.
Egee bid the crew goodbye, warmed by the encounter they'd had. He watched as the pilot circled the church, sure that the man was at that moment keeping his promise about the photograph.
But Egee's spirits started to sink when he learned that a helicopter had crashed in another rural community, just a few hours from his home some 50 miles north of Pensacola.
He and his wife launched an information-gathering campaign, trying to find out if their new friends were aboard that doomed craft.
The more they learned, in bits and pieces, the more heartsick they became.
The helicopter that crashed near Grand Ridge in Jackson County was red and white, like the one that landed in Egee's community. It was an R44, again matching with the helicopter they'd encountered.
There were three men aboard, they learned.
The couple's final confirmation came Thursday afternoon when they learned the name of the pilot in the crash.
"They were a nice bunch of guys, just great," Steve Egee said.
Robbie Egee said she and her husband are now concerned about the families of the men, and are trying to make contact so they can pass along the last pictures taken of their loved ones.
"I know, I believe very much, they'd want to have them," she said. "We had three or four people taking pictures, and what I think they'll show is that these men were happy in their last hours.
"I'd like their families to have the comfort of seeing that," she said. "I'm so sorry that this was them."
The Egee family is making arrangements to make sure those survivors have a way to reach them so they'll be able to deliver that comfort.
This story can be found at: http://www.jcfloridan.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JCF/MGArticle/JCF_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1128769129687&path=!frontpa ge