Houses shook, the smell of gas permeated the air and debris from the small plane that crashed and exploded into a lake were flung into the streets of the Windsor Bay neighborhood in Coral Springs, 911 callers told dispatchers.
Coral Springs Police were inundated with call after call shortly after 10 a.m. Monday, detailing the minutes after the 1976 Beech B100 aircraft came quickly dropping out of the air into the gated community in the 5000 block of Northwest 57th Way.
Alexander Wurm, a 53-year-old Christian pastor, and his daughter Serena, 22, were killed as they tried to fly to Jamaica to deliver Hurricane Melissa relief supplies. The same plane had traveled to and from Montego Bay and George Town, the capital of the Cayman Islands, within the previous week, flight tracking data on FlightAware shows.
Just seconds after the plane hit the lake, neighbors were trying to look for any survivors in the water, according to 18 calls to 911 released by the police department Friday.
One woman told the dispatcher that nobody survived.
“I just see rubble, like, there’s nobody … They’re gone,” the woman said.
“OK, so you’re saying nobody made it out?” the dispatcher asked.
“There’s, no, they didn’t make it,” the woman replied.
The plane itself was nowhere to be seen, multiple callers said.
One man who called 911 did not yet know that a plane crash was the source of the explosion he felt, the flying debris he saw and the “oily” smell.
On Friday afternoon, investigators used a crane to pull from the water what remained at all intact, a relatively small mangled section of the plane, videos and photos shared with the South Florida Sun Sentinel by resident Herman Schnell show. Schnell said he saw officials on the water using sonar technology to find pieces and collecting soil samples from around the lake. Pieces of the plane are still being found in treetops days later.
Posts by Wurm on social media suggested the evangelist had recently acquired the plane to further his missionary work across the Caribbean, describing the aircraft as “an older King Air with brand new engines,” and “perfect” to ferry deliveries of generators, batteries and building materials to Jamaica.
“Perfect for the mission to bring relief goods into Montego Bay and the plane is ready just in time!” he wrote in a social media post on Nov. 2.
Earlier this week, the Cayman International Assembly of God Church in Camana Bay in the Cayman Islands held a service in honor of Wurm and Serena, according to a livestream shared on Wurm’s ministry’s Facebook page. They played a video that Wurm had earlier requested his ministry put together, after his first relief trip to Jamaica, according to a leader who spoke at the service.
In one clip, the video showed Wurm sitting in the pilot seat of the plane describing the supplies he had brought for Montego Bay, including generators, solar panels, battery packs, hardware and tarps. He said he was hoping to travel back and forth with more supplies to help.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.