Indiana Pilot Crashes into Ex-In-Law's House

By the time Beth Johnson rushed to tell police that she suspected her ex-husband had abducted their 8-year-old daughter, it was too late.

Eric Johnson had already strapped Emily into the passenger seat of a leased single-engine Cessna and taken off from Virgil I. Grissom Municipal Airport, police said. Moments later, the aircraft slammed into the side of his former mother-in-law's house.

Johnson, 47, and his daughter died in the crash, which investigators suspect was intentional.

"It is just gut-wrenching to think about what was happening to that child just prior to the crash," State Police 1st Sgt. Dave Bursten said Monday night at a news conference in Indianapolis.

Emily didn't go to school Monday, and her mother arrived at the Bedford police headquarters about 11:30 a.m. to say she believed her ex-husband had abducted the girl, Bursten said.

By then, investigators already were examining the wreckage of the plane crash at her mother, Vivian Pace's, home in Bedford, about 20 miles south of Bloomington.

Before the pilot was identified, Pace told The Times-Mail newspaper that she was in the living room when the plane struck the side of her one-story home. She said everything fell off the walls. Pace wasn't injured, and the crash into a side wall did not start a fire.

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

"I thought he would do something to get back at Beth," Pace said. "He was a very possessive person. He got what he wanted."

State and Bedford police were treating the criminal investigation as a suicide and homicide, Bursten said. No note of explanation had yet been found, Bursten said. He said authorities hoped to have a better understanding of what happened and why after the National Transportation Safety Board completes its investigation, which could take up to a year.

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