Passenger in American River plane crash dies after 15 days in coma

The passenger of a plane that crashed into the American River died Thursday after spending more than two weeks hospitalized in a coma.

Candace Huffman Marshall, a 64-year-old Colorado resident, was one of two occupants in an amphibious plane that ended up submerged following a failed water landing near Interstate 5 and the Jibboom Street Bridge on Jan. 2.

Marshall was a resident of Parker, Colo., as local news outlet FOX 31 reported earlier this month. Her daughter, Angie Harcrow, set up a public blog via Facebook giving twice-daily updates of her mother’s condition at the hospital.

In an interview with The Bee on Sunday, Harcrow said her mother had gone flying with her longtime friend Keith Hezmalhalch, who piloted the aircraft from Napa to Sacramento, where they had planned to land the amphibious craft in the river and bring it to shore. Hezmalhalch had successfully done so previously, Harcrow said, and her mother had been flying with him once or twice a year for a few years.

The latest post on Harcrow’s blog reported that Marshall was given morphine for pain and medicine for seizures and died at 1:41 a.m. Thursday.

Harcrow’s earlier posts suggest Marshall broke multiple ribs and sustained serious kidney damage during the crash, and was trapped underwater for several minutes. This led to brain damage, neurological doctors told Harcrow, and Marshall likely never regained consciousness, her daughter wrote.

The plane is an experimental single-engine SeaRey built by Progressive Aerodyne Inc.

Sacramento Deputy Director of Parks Liz Bellas said the plane tumbled when at least one of its wheels did not retract during the planned water landing. Hezmalhalch suffered non-serious injuries, Bellas and Sacramento Fire Department officials said. Harcrow described the crash as a “tragic accident.”

Sacramento County’s Regional Parks Department initially was in charge of the investigation and gathered statements from witnesses and the pilot, while the Sacramento Fire Department helped recover the aircraft from the river and mitigate the spread of oil into the waterway. These tasks would typically be handled by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Coast Guard, respectively, but due to the still-ongoing federal government shutdown, these agencies were not available to respond, Bellas explained.

A database maintained by NTSB of all civilian accidents indicates there had not been a fatal plane crash recorded within Sacramento city limits since 1994.

Harcrow said her mother loved to cook for other people and visited California frequently to see family.

“Mom was just one of those people that always reached out,” Harcrow said. “She was just always that giving soul. She was never cross, never angry.”