Father offers reward for proof son blameless in plane crash

LAKE ST. LOUIS, Mo. -- Leo Lawrence doesn't think his son was to blame for a plane crash last year and he believes the proof may be hidden in the dense woods of central Missouri.

Lawrence is offering a $5,000 reward to any Osage County property owner who finds a missing part that he believes is crucial to finding the cause of the accident that killed his son and a passenger. Lawrence has appealed to Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., to order a thorough search for the part, and one of his son's friends is organizing a search of the countryside near Koeltztown, about 25 miles south of Jefferson City.

Lawrence's son, also named Leo, was flying a Pilatus PC-12/45 last Sept. 14 when the single-engine plane crashed in Osage County 15 minutes after takeoff. The crash killed the younger Lawrence, 32, and an acquaintance, Samar Alsarabi, 37.

Family and friends say pilot error does not seem a logical cause considering the younger Lawrence was a meticulous pilot.

"He was a pilot's pilot," Lawrence, of Lake St. Louis, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I just know that if someone will search for the truth, it will show that he was doing everything he could."

Radar picked up a "target" in the wooded Osage County area, but Lawrence fears National Transportation Safety Board investigators will blame the crash on pilot error if they don't consider the evidence. An NTSB spokeswoman said the crash is still under investigation.

According to records, Lawrence's son was flying to South Bend, Ind., at the time of the crash. He had taken off from the Lee C. Fine Airport in Lake of the Ozarks State Park and spoken with a flight service station in St. Louis about light rain nearing the airport shortly after takeoff.

Lawrence, who had been a pilot for four years, had logged 1,645 hours of total flight time, including 58 hours in the PC-12/45, according to NTSB records. He held a flight-instructor certificate and a commercial pilot certificate with single-engine, multi-engine and instrument ratings.

He had gone through ground, simulator and flight instruction at SimCom Training Centers in Florida several weeks before the accident. That included three hours of instruction in that model of plane and 7 1/2 hours in a flight-training device, records show.

"There are very few natural pilots around who can feel the airplane and tell what is going on. It is just a gift," said Lawrence's flight instructor, Dave Volker, of Palm City, Fla. "He was a natural pilot. His judgment was good."

Lawrence had radioed air traffic controllers about five minutes after takeoff to say he was climbing to 7,000 feet. Radar data show the plane headed toward the northeast while starting to climb to 13,800 feet, according to a Safety Board report. The pilot didn't mention a problem, according to a partial air-traffic control transcript.

Eyewitnesses on nearby Willibrand Lake said they saw the plane in a nosedive and heard its engine "screaming loud."

NTSB spokeswoman Lauren Peduzzi said radar shows a target that has not been verified as a piece of the aircraft. Peduzzi said the target appeared after the plane had already started to descend. Investigators found all the flight-control components, both wings, the engine and the propeller blades at the crash scene and no critical components were missing when pieces were later laid out next to a Pilatus PC-12/45 for comparison, Peduzzi said.

Thomas Noonan, attorney for the Alsarabi family, said he plans to have an aviation expert inspect the primary wreckage -- which is being stored in St. Charles County -- to develop a theory explaining why the plane went down.

Alsarabi's surviving family members in Boston have filed a claim against Lawrence's estate but have not taken any further legal action.

"They weren't encountering any dangerous weather because they wanted to get somewhere," Noonan said. "They were not acting irresponsibly. They were just flying to go pick up some passengers. And then something horribly wrong happened, and they faced possibly the worst of all possible deaths: crashing to the ground in a plane with its engines screaming."