A crash, an explosion, then mayhem

The first police officers arrived minutes after the plane fell from the sky.

“It landed on the plaza there,” an officer called over his radio. “The plane that landed crashed into the plaza!”

“Stuff’s still blowin’ up!” another yelled. Sirens and screams echoed in the background.

The scene that first responders encountered just after 6 p.m. Friday at a busy Northeast Philadelphia intersection was apocalyptic: a jet had slammed into the middle of a residential neighborhood, creating a blocks-long disaster surrounded by rowhouses, businesses, and the Roosevelt Mall.

Debris was everywhere, cars and houses were on fire. Human remains were scattered on rooftops, inside burning homes, and even in the street.

The plane that plummeted 1,650 feet at more than 235 miles per hour was so destroyed that police officers and other first responders initially couldn’t tell what kind of aircraft it was or how many people had been on board.

Soon, they would learn it was a medical transport plane carrying six people, including a child and her mother. It had departed Northeast Philadelphia Airport just one minute before it began its final, violent descent.

Firefighters arrived less than five minutes after the crash, and quickly battled fast-moving blazes at several separate scenes, putting down flames and evacuating residents amid fear of jet fuel explosions. Police officers carried burn victims and worked to calm crowds of bystanders who gathered to witness and film the scene.

“I really thought the world was ending,” said Andre Gary, who had been shopping. “It really just fell out of the sky.”

Everyone on board the plane was killed, including an 11-year-old girl from Mexico who was finally heading home after spending months in Philadelphia receiving medical care. The girl’s mother and a four-person flight crew also perished, along with a man driving to the mall, who was trapped and engulfed in the flames. His son and partner were also in the car and badly burned.

At least 24 people were injured, several of them critically, including a 10-year-old boy, and a firefighter who suffered a heart attack.

By the time the fires were contained, about two hours after impact, the battered landscape would become the scene of a sprawling investigation spanning much of a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood, leaving residents to rebuild after an unthinkable tragedy.

This is how the crash unfolded, according to dozens of interviews with city officials, first responders, eyewitnesses, and residents.

Valentina Guzmán Murillo was on her way home.

The 11-year-old from a town outside Tijuana, Mexico had spent four months undergoing treatment for a spinal condition at Shriners Children’s Philadelphia and, on Friday, accompanied by her mother, Lizeth Murillo Osuna, boarded a small medical transport plane contracted by the hospital and operated by Jet Rescue Air Ambulance.

The jet — staffed by two pilots and two medical providers — was headed first to Springfield, Mo., then to Mexico.

The plane took off from the Northeast Philadelphia Airport at 6:06 p.m.

But just one minute after takeoff, at about 1,600 feet up, something went catastrophically wrong and the plane, as if propelled by a missile, hurtled toward the earth on fire.

There was a flash of light, then an earthshaking boom and a mushroom cloud of smoke and fire.

The sky was orange.

The plane cratered into Cottman Avenue, hurling fireballs in all directions and scattering debris six blocks wide, from Roosevelt Boulevard to Bustleton Avenue. Oxygen tanks fell from the sky and exploded.

A piece of metal pierced a window at a diner and hit a customer in the head. A father and his children were picking up strawberry doughnuts from Dunkin’ when a part of the plane crashed into their car, and sliced into his 10-year-old son’s head.

Multiple people were driving down Cottman Avenue when the plane struck, sending cars up in flames. A 37-year-old Mount Airy man and his girlfriend and 9-year-old son were trapped. The father died from his injuries, while the others are still fighting for their lives.

As fire rained down from above, five homes on three blocks ignited — flames, fed by the 5,000 pounds of fuel aboard the flight, were burning hot and spreading fast.

Responders didn’t have much time.

Two minutes after the call “airplane versus house” flashed across fire officials’ screens, firefighters from Engine 71 arrived. They focused first on the epicenter of the fires: five homes that were quickly burning up and a sixth that had a gaping hole in it, said Fire Department Captain Daniel McCarty.

On Calvert Street, the second floor of a rowhouse was on fire, and the roof was caving in. On Rupert Street, the first floor of a corner house was blown out. Body parts were scattered in the home, and there was blood on the walls.

Residents of the blocks on fire had, for the most part, rushed out of their homes almost immediately, McCarty said, and started banging on their neighbors’ doors and helping others to escape.

Philadelphia police, including some who had been on patrol near the block and saw the plane go down, began tending to burn victims.

“We’re at the Dunkin’ Donuts,” an officer said over the radio, sounding out of breath. “We just got one of the ladies. She’s burned up.”

Others tried to contain the dozens of bystanders rushing out of their homes and the restaurants and stores at the Roosevelt Mall to see and film the devastation.

Officials were still trying to understand the scope of destruction. At 6:15 p.m., a police commander came over the radio, pleading for information.

“What size plane are we talking?” he asked. “Is it a commercial or a private plane? We need to know the magnitude.”

No one knew just yet.

“It’s completely destroyed,” the officer responded. Then, he speculated: “Could be private.”

Police called utility companies to shut off gas and electricity to keep fire from spreading even more.

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel was speeding toward the scene. He had been in his office when a colleague ran in to tell him that a plane had crashed into one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.

“I did not believe them initially,” Bethel said. “I couldn’t fathom that.”

He arrived around 6:30 p.m., he said, and rushed into the center of it all. He was surrounded by fire, screams, body parts strewn across roads and cars.

“I felt like we were in the middle of a war zone,” he said. “I sit and watch TV and hear about bombings, and you think what is the aftermath of a bombing? This was the first time that I would see what that would look like.”

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and her team had been notified, as had area hospitals, where doctors and medical workers were told to prepare for a mass casualty event.

Leaders of the city’s emergency response agencies began to gather at their headquarters on Spring Garden Street, watching events unfold on the intersection’s surveillance cameras.

More than 300 fire personnel would be dispatched to the scene that night, including 55 vehicles, from all corners of the city, Roxborough to Mayfair, said McCarty.

In the meantime, bystanders were tending to one another. A man took off his shirt to try and stanch blood from the head wound of an unconscious 10-year-old boy. Officers dragged people out of burning cars, and carried those who’d collapsed from inhaling the black smoke to their cruisers and rushed them to the hospital.

Twenty-four people, ages 4 to 50, were injured.

City and state officials arrived at the scene, some huddling under a tent and talking to first responders while rain poured down. Word spread that the mayor was on her way. Local leaders were briefing their national counterparts on the incident response and fielding phone calls from media outlets across the nation.

Reporters and photographers, too, were shaken. They were told to watch where they stepped — human remains were still being recovered nearby.

“It’s one of those things that doesn’t feel real when you first hear it,” said State Sen. Joe Picozzi, who just took office in January and estimated that he’s been through that intersection hundreds of times. “It was a lot to take in.”

The fire was finally placed under control.

Fire Commissioner Jeffrey Thompson said the speed with which his companies battled the blazes was remarkable, given the volatility and ferocity of jet fuel.

“This incident isn’t something that most fire departments see,” he said. “It took a lot of resources, some out-of-the-box thinking.”

Before 9 p.m., Gov. Josh Shapiro and President Donald Trump had each been briefed, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The National Transportation Safety Board deployed a national response team. Parker held two briefings with media — national press carried coverage live, in part because the incident came just days after a commercial jet collided with a military helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.

Shortly after 9 p.m., Trump posted on social media that he was “so sad” to see the plane go down.

“More innocent souls lost,” he wrote.

Emergency personnel were on site through the night. Those in oversight roles, like McCarty, were at the city’s emergency response headquarters until 5 a.m., he said.

As daylight dawned, the sheer level of destruction emerged. There were burned-out shells of cars in the middle of the street. Officials towed more than 20 vehicles away from the scene that had been completely destroyed.

Reporters kept asking how many people had died, but officials could not say for certain. They knew that all six people aboard the flight were dead, along with the man in the car on the ground who was burned. But the magnitude and scope of the explosion was such that they would have to rely on DNA testing to determine how many lives were lost.

Police compiled a list of missing persons reports from that day and the next. They won’t say how many people are on it, in part because they don’t yet know how many remain unaccounted for as a result of the crash.

Investigators collected more than a thousand tissue samples from the scene through the weekend. In some cases, the evidence was found far from the crash site. A woman who had been on the road in the area of the crash that night drove away shaken, only to reach home and find a body part on the roof of her car. She called 911.

A key piece of understanding the disaster was still missing.

Officials continued to search for the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, which captures radio transmissions and sounds, such as engine noises and the pilot’s final words, and that is essential to understanding what caused the crash.

Finally, just after 6 p.m., they found it, buried at the bottom of the eight-foot-deep crater in the street.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board are poring over the contents, as they work to determine what happened. A first report should be done in 30 days.

As the weekend came to a close, first responders and residents struggled to make sense of what they’d seen on that cold and fiery night. Bethel, the police commissioner, said the city would work to repair the damage, but that “nothing in that area will ever be normal again.”

The scope of the damage became more clear: four homes were completely destroyed, and 17 others were damaged.

Michelle Peralta, 19, said over the weekend that she could still picture what she saw Friday night as she felt the earth shake, then ran outside her place of work: the smoke, the debris, an arm lying in the middle of the road.

“People around me were crying and screaming,” she said. “I felt like I was in a movie. Nothing seemed real.”

But everything was real — the screams, the flames, the souls lost and the lives forever changed.

Staff writers Michelle Myers, Sean Collins Walsh, Ximena Conde, Melanie Burney, Dylan Purcell, Ryan Briggs, Harold Brubaker, Erin McCarthy, Fallon Roth, and Aubrey Whelan contributed to this article.

Drone video by Miguel Martinez.