Good Samaritan rushes to help victims of Naples, Florida plane crash: 'Are they alive?'

Dan Glaun, USA TODAY
Updated ·2 min read
18

As Kyle Cavaliere drove down I-75 in Naples, Florida an object in motion caught the corner of his eye.

He turned to look. It was an airplane, and something was terribly wrong.

"After a couple of seconds I realized it was not going up, it was actually going down," Cavaliere told the Naples Daily News in an email.

The plane, a Bombardier 600 private jet, crashed on top of a white pickup truck two cars in front of him, Cavaliere wrote. It spun out of the control and burst into flames, coming to rest off the shoulder of the highway.

"As I passed the plane you could feel the heat even from inside the vehicle," wrote Cavaliere, a Naples businessman.

The jet was flying into Naples from Columbus, Ohio when its pilot reported losing power in both engines, according to a recording of flight radio traffic.

Pilot Edward Daniel Murphy, 50, of Oakland Park, Florida and second in command Ian Frederick Hofmann, 65, of Pompano Beach, Florida died in the crash, the Collier County Sheriff's Office said Saturday afternoon.

Crew member Sydney Ann Bosmans, 27, of Jupiter, Florida; and passengers Aaron Baker, 35, and Audra Green, 23, both of Columbus, Ohio, survived.

All the occupants of two automobiles damaged in the crash survived, Florida Highway Patrol said.

Cavaliere told the Daily News that he stopped his car and checked on the driver of the pickup, who said he didn't need assistance. Then he saw survivors running out of the plane and darted across three lanes of traffic to try to help, according to cell phone video he shared with the Daily News.

Plane crash history: 3 people were killed just after takeoff from Naples airport in 2002

'Are they alive?'

"Is there anybody else in there?" he shouted.

"Yes, our pilots!" one of the survivors responded.

"Are they alive?"

"I don't know!"

Cavaliere wrote that he helped survivors cross the street, as a cloud of thick black smoke billowed from the engulfed jet.

"At that point I couldn’t do anything else and all that I was going to be is another person in the way so I left," Cavaliere wrote. "Just an incredibly tragic event but I give praise to the pilots for their heroism and remaining calm under pressure."

This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Naples, Florida plane crash: Man rushes to help plane crash victims