23-year-old man who ‘exited’ plane found dead in Fuquay-Varina after massive search

A 23-year-old man who “exited” a plane Friday afternoon before it made an emergency landing at Raleigh-Durham International Airport was found dead around 7 p.m. Friday in Fuquay-Varina, authorities said.

After a massive search that involved several municipal, county and federal agencies, the man’s body was found behind a house near Sunset Lake and Hilltop Needmore roads, Darshan Patel, operations manager for Wake County emergency management, said at a news briefing.

Friday night, the man was identified as Charles Hew Crooks of Raleigh, according to a post on the Fuquay-Varina Police Department’s Facebook page. Earlier Friday, Patel did not identify Crooks but said he was 23 years old.

Crooks was the plane’s co-pilot, the Fuquay-Varina Police Department said.

Patel and Fuquay-Varina police said Crooks was found after a resident in the Sonoma Springs subdivision flagged down search crews who already were in the vicinity of the neighborhood.

That was the tragic ending to a confusing emergency at RDU Friday. Shortly before 3 p.m., a twin-engine turbo prop aircraft reported landing gear issues as it approached the airport, according to the airport. The plane landed on Runway 5R-23L and veered into the grass, according to the airport.

The pilot, the only passenger on the plane when it reached the ground, was taken to a Duke University hospital with minor injuries, an airport spokesperson said.

Authorities received a report about the missing man around 2:30 or 2:45 p.m., Patel said. By 5 p.m., EMS, police and fire departments were searching a large swath of Wake County for a second person who may have “exited the plane while it was in air,” said Carolyn Roman with the Town of Cary.

Patel said search crews had “wished for a better outcome.” He didn’t know whether the man who had died had jumped or fallen, he said. The man did not have a parachute, Patel said.

He did not know how high the plane was flying when the man exited the plane, but a map of the plane’s flight path from ADS-B Exchange, a flight-tracking service, suggests the plane was at about 3,850 feet. It crossed over Hilltop Needmore Road about 2:30.

Patel and the Fuquay-Varina Police Department deferred questions on the investigation to RDU, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.

Searchers worked with RDU Airport and the FAA to map the plane’s flight plan and compare it to the pilot’s radio traffic, Patel said. Searchers deployed a drone as well as an N.C. State Highway Patrol helicopter to comb a large area from southern Wake County to the Harnett County line, Patel said.

Searchers were narrowing their search area when the man’s body was found.

Few details on plane’s path

According to FlightAware.com, the plane departed from Raeford in Hoke County at 1:10 p.m. and landed about 2:49 p.m.

Because the flight was not a commercial flight, airport officials did not know whether RDU was the intended destination.

The plane is registered to Spore LTD LLC from Colorado Springs, according to FlightAware.

According to the company’s North Carolina business registration, Spore Ltd. is managed by another company, Rampart Aviation, which offers pilot and aircraft training commercially and for the Department of Defense.

A recently uploaded photo of the aircraft shows a Rampart logo on the tail of the plane.

Mindy Fulton, listed as Spore Ltd.’s company agent and the director of human resources for Rampart on Linkedin, declined to comment when contacted by the N&O.

This story was originally published July 29, 2022 at 3:48 PM.

Kristen Johnson

The News & Observer

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Kristen Johnson is a local government reporter covering Durham for The News & Observer. She previously covered Cary and western Wake County. Prior to coming home to the Triangle, she reported for The Fayetteville Observer and spent time covering politics and culture in Washington, D.C. She is an alumna of UNC at Charlotte and American University.