Body Matching Dick Ebersol’s Son Found

MONTROSE, Colo. – Digging through the charred, twisted wreckage of a crashed corporate jet, investigators found what they believe to be the body of NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol’s 14-year-old son.

Next up is another difficult task: figuring out why the charter plane skidded off the runway, killing three people and injuring three others, including Ebersol and his college-age son.

“I had two major concerns when I got here,” said Arnold Scott, lead investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. “The first was to recover the sixth occupant and the second was to recover the cockpit voice recorder. We accomplished those things and now we’ll get into the intricate details of the investigation.”

The plane carrying Ebersol and two of his sons crashed Sunday during a snowstorm while taking off from the airport outside this small town 185 miles southwest of Denver. Investigators began sifting through the wreckage Monday, finally finding a body beneath the fuselage that matched that of 14-year-old Edward “Teddy” Ebersol, a freshman at a Connecticut boarding school.

The pilot, 50-year-old Luis Alberto Polanco Espaillat, of the Dominican Republic, and flight attendant Warren T. Richardson III, 36, of Coral Gables, Fla., were killed on impact. Ebersol and his oldest son, Charles, are expected to recover after being taken to a hospital in Grand Junction and the co-pilot was in critical condition at a burn unit in Denver.

The Ebersols were flying home from California after Notre Dame played Southern California in a Saturday football game. Charles is a senior at Notre Dame and another Ebersol son, 18-year-old Willie, is a freshman at USC.

The plane stopped in Colorado to drop off Ebersol’s wife, actress Susan Saint James, then was taking off to head for South Bend, Ind., to drop Charles off at school. Instead, the plane skidded through a field, punched through two fences and burst into flames after crossing a small road.

Doug Percival heard the crash and ran from the office of the towing company where he works, arriving just as Charles pleaded for him to rescue his kid brother. Nearby, Dick Ebersol sat on the snowy ground amid the billowing smoke and chunks of wreckage, numbly rocking back and forth.

“You could tell he was in shock. Both of them had been ripped out of their shoes,” Percival said.

Percival said he was going to crawl through a hole in the plane to look for survivors but turned around because of smoke. He said leaking jet fuel soon exploded “like Roman candles.”

Gary Ellis was teaching Sunday school at a Baptist Church near the airport when he heard a loud “poof.”

“It came to a rest, and a moment or two later it exploded into a huge fireball,” said Ellis. “It was burning as it came down the runway.”

With light snow falling Monday morning, crews began picking through the blackened pile of twisted metal and a 6-foot-high shard of warped fuselage. Two engines lay on the ground near the tail section and cows from a nearby pen looked on as a backhoe was brought in to dig under the wreckage.

Investigators finally pulled out the body just before dark, using another tractor to lift up the wreckage before covering the site with a gray tarp as they wrapped up for the night.

“I’m not going to discuss the condition of the body out of respect for the family,” coroner Mark Young said. “May God be with his soul.”

A heavy snowstorm had eased up before the plane prepared to take off, but there was no immediate word if weather was a factor. Steve McLaughlin of MTJ Air Services, which de-ices private planes at the airport, said his company did not de-ice Ebersol’s plane before it took off. Airport Manager Scott Brownlee said he did not know whether the plane had been de-iced.

Witnesses said it appeared the plane, a CL-601 Challenger, never got off the ground, and Arnold said one of the survivors said it felt as if the plane was sliding off the runway during takeoff.

“I’m not familiar with the performance of this particular airplane but as we all know, ice can have detrimental effects on lifting surfaces,” he said.