Sinful

Sunday night/Monday morning I couldn’t sleep I finally caved and took an Ambien (a time-release sleep medication) at about 3am. I fell asleep somewhere around 330. Sleep wasn’t in the cards that night. At 530 Monday morning my dad’s wife calls my house and tells me that the plane my dad was on is missing. There had been no contact since they left the airport in Ruidoso to transport a 15 month old girl to a hospital in Albuquerque.

My dad was a flight nurse. My dad was a hero.

The plane took off sometime between 10 and 11pm Sunday night. From recent reports, it crashed four minutes after take-off. While traveling around a mountain range outside of Ruidoso, something went wrong. We don’t know what went wrong, probably we never will. The plane crashed into the side of a mountain in a place called “Devil’s Canyon,” which is a treacherous place to navigate during the day… even worse at night.

My dad’s wife called to say the plane was missing, that the National Guard and the New Mexico State Police had helicopters out searching for it… less than 20 minutes later she calls back to say that the plane was found, but they didn’t know if there were any survivors. The Search and Rescue crews spent nearly an hour hiking into the scene on foot.

There were no survivors. Nobody made it. They were all gone. I can’t bring them back…

Nobody survived.