Two people were killed when a plane bringing much-needed supplies to storm-ravaged Jamaica crashed in Florida on Monday.
The Beechcraft King Air turboprop plane took off from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport at around 10.14am headed for Montego Bay, and crashed into the pond of a gated residential neighborhood in Coral Springs soon after, narrowly avoiding homes as it went down, WPTV reports.
Shocking surveillance footage obtained by Local 10 News showed the small plane diving nose-first at a high rate of speed into the ground – taking out part of a fence in the wealthy Windsor Bay neighborhood – before it splashed into the water behind a resident’s pool.
‘We just see this black figure, it was a plane, going straight down,’ witness Marcos Lima recounted.
Moments later, he said he and others saw ‘pieces of the plane and body parts everywhere.’
Emergency crews responded within minutes of the first phone call about the crashed plane, and were on the scene at 10.19am – just five minutes after the plane took off, Coral Springs-Parkland Fire Department Deputy Chief Mike Moser said.
No victims were originally found as authorities conducted rescue efforts, and first responders then shifted to a recovery operation.
Police have since confirmed that two people were killed in the collision and there were no survivors onboard, but did not provide any further details about the occupants of the plane.
No injuries reported on the ground.
Emergency crews sprang into action when a small turboprop plane crashed in a gated community in Florida on Monday
The plane narrowly avoided residential homes as it crashed into a residential pond
‘There was no actual plane to be seen,’ Moser said. ‘They followed the debris to the water. We had divers that entered the water and tried to search for any victims and didn’t find any.’
Federal records show the plane is registered to International Air Services, a company that markets itself as specializing in providing trust agreements to non-US citizens that enable them to register aircrafts with the FAA, according to WPTV.
It had been manufactured in 1976, according to Federal Aviation Administration records, and is designed to hold between seven to 12 people, according to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
Flight tracking website FlightAware shows the plane made four other trips to Jamaica over the past week, but it is unclear who was organizing the trips.
Broward County in southern Florida, however, is home to a large Caribbean American community that sprang into action to collect relief supplies following Hurricane Melissa – which ripped the roofs off of some 120,000 buildings in Jamaica, affecting some 90,000 families.
One week later, more than 2,000 people were still reported to be in shelters.
The Coral Springs Police Department is now taking over the recovery efforts, as federal aviation officials investigate the cause of the crash.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
