Investigators are treating an airplane crash on Monday as a murder-suicide. Eric Johnson, 47, of Bedford, Ind., a student pilot, rented a single-engine Cessna from his local airport, took his eight-year-old daughter, Emily, with him, and crashed into the roof of his ex-mother-in-law’s house. Nobody in the house was hurt. Johnson and his wife had divorced last year. The Indianapolis Star reported that he had taken the girl on a vacation to Cancun, and was supposed to drop her off at school Monday morning, where her mother would later pick her up. Instead, he called his ex-wife and said he planned to keep the girl, the ex-wife’s mother told reporters. “I’ve got her, and you’re not going to get her,” he reportedly said. The crash scene is close to a small airport. “There’s simply no way that pilot could have been anything but aiming,” Jim McFarland, a volunteer paramedic who was among the first on the scene, said in the Chicago Tribune. “There is a field just across the street he could have put down safely. He knew what he was doing.”
(AP Photo/Rich Janzaruk)
