Mother, Two Children Die When Plane Hits Their House

Read update here: Death Of Brick Woman, Sons In Plane Crash Sends Shockwaves Through Community

A former Brick resident and her two children were among six people killed Monday when a plane crashed into their house in Maryland, authorities said.

Marie Gemmell, a stay-at-home mother, and two of her children died when the aircraft hit their Gaithersburg, Md. home early Monday and set several houses on fire, authorities said.

The victims of the ground - Gemmel, 36; Cole, 3; and Devin, 6 weeks - were in the second-floor bathroom when the accident happened; Gemmell was lying on top of her kids apparently to shield her children from the crash and the fire, according to USA Today.

Her 5-year-old daughter went to school Monday morning and was reportedly safe, while the father, Kenneth, was not home when the crash happened.

A gofundme page has been set up for the Gemmell family, already raising more than $12,000 by the end of Monday.

Gemmell was a 1997 Brick Memorial graduate, friends say. There is a gift-card drive set up for the family. If you’d like to help, you can send a gift card to: Jennifer Strassheim, Heim Electronics, 1868 Route 88 East, Brick, N.J., 08724

Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services spokesman Pete Piringer said via Twitter about 10:45 a.m. Monday that the crash happened on Drop Forge Lane off Snouffer School Road. The twin-engine 10-passenger plane came down near houses on Drop Forge Lane near Blue Smoke Lane, he said.

A wing of the aircraft containing fuel went into that house; crews subsequently put out the fire and shut off the utilities while they searched. Later, they found the bodies, according to USA Today.

Tracy Everett, an eyewitness to the crash, said he saw the plane flying erratically just a couple hundred feet above the treetops. The trouble plane “was up, down, left, right, struggling to keep his position,” Everett told Montgomery Community Media.

The plane veered right, then made a sharp left before taking a “nose barrel dive into the neighborhood,” Everett said. “Just a bad scene.”

At about 11:40 a.m. Piringer updated that firefighters had gained control of the fires. Several homes were damaged by the downed plane, he said.

About 6:45 p.m. Piringer tweeted that officials have confirmed six fatalities from the crash, including the one adult and two children in the house at 19733 Drop Forge Lane. The crash site is less than a mile from the Montgomery County Airpark.

The cause of the crash is not yet known. Two homes had fire damage and one or two other houses had property damage, Piringer said.

Montgomery County Fire Chief Steve Lohr said at a news briefing that the most heavily damaged house is structurally unstable. Rescuers are trying to shore up the remaining structure to continue searching for victims in the house; authorities don’t know if anyone was in the house when the crash happened.

Residents in all the other surrounding houses have been accounted for, Lohr said.

Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are at the crash site.

Plane’s Owner Involved in Earlier Crash

The plane’s owner, Dr. Michael J. Rosenberg - CEO of North Carolina-based Health Decisions - was among the three people killed on the plane, reports WJLA TV. He was described as an experienced pilot.

Authorities have not released the identities of his two passengers.

Rosenberg had survived a March 2010 crash into some trees near the same air field -- Montgomery County Airpark. That accident destroyed his $1.4 million turbo-prop plane. “The pilot’s failure to maintain aircraft control while performing a go-around” was cited by the NTSB as the crash cause, reports WJLA.

Patch will update this story as details become available. Contributing to this article were Deb Belt and Karen Wall.

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