Father takes daughter on plane before crashing it

FEDERAL and state investigators were trying to determine yesterday why a man took his eight-year-old daughter up in a small plane and then crashed it into his former mother-in-law’s home, killing the little girl and himself.

Eric Johnson strapped his daughter, Emily, into the passenger seat of a leased, single-engine Cessna on Monday and took off from Virgil I Grissom Municipal Airport, police said. Moments later, the aircraft slammed into the side of Vivian Pace’s house in this southern Indiana city.

State and Bedford police were treating the criminal investigation as a suicide and homicide, State Police 1st Sergeant Dave Bursten said. No note of explanation had been found, he said.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigation could take up to a year.

Emily didn’t go to school on Monday, and her mother, Beth Johnson, arrived at Bedford police headquarters about 11:30am to say she believed her ex-husband had abducted the girl.

By then, investigators already were examining the wreckage of the plane crash at Ms Pace’s home.

Sgt Bursten said Ms Johnson gave specific information about an alleged abduction, but he declined to release details. “All of those things together lead us in the direction that this was done intentionally,” he said.

Ms Pace was not injured.

Sgt Bursten said that eyewitness accounts of the plane’s movements just before the crash led police to suspect the crash was deliberate, as did the relationships involved.