Plane crash’s sole survivor, 7, identified
Girl’s parents, sister, cousin killed in plane accident
Larry Wilkins was watching the evening news Friday when he heard a knock on his door. Standing on his porch was a bloodied and barefoot 7-year-old girl, who said through her tears that she had just been in a plane crash.
Stunned, Wilkins, 71, took the child in, put her on his couch and called 911. His two dachshunds, Pete and Bonnie, comforted her until police and an ambulance arrived 10 minutes later, he told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday.
Through her jitters and crying, Wilkins said he pieced together that the girl had climbed out from the wreckage and walked about three-quarters of a mile through dense forest littered with fallen hickory trees in 40-degree weather.
“I just can’t imagine a 7-year-old girl with enough spunk to walk through the woods after all that – that is something else,” he said.
The girl, later identified as Sailor Gutzler, was traveling in a plane from Key West, Florida, to Mount Vernon, Illinois, with her parents, Marty Gutzler, 48, and Kimberly Gutzler, 46, her sister Piper, 9, and her cousin, Sierra Wilder, 14, when the small plane crashed in the woods near Kuttawa, Kentucky, police said.
Sailor was treated at Lourdes Hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, and released early Saturday to a relative, the Kentucky State Police said.
Neighbors said Marty and Kim Gutzler had lifelong roots in the largely rural southern Illinois town of Nashville, about 50 miles east of St. Louis.
The couple were well-known and well-liked, said neighbor Carla Povolish.
Povolish said the two sisters – Sailor and Piper – were together constantly.
“That’s what’s going to be so devastating for the little one,” she said.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the cause of the crash of the Piper PA-34-200T plane, according to a statement from the Kentucky State Police.