Neighbors grieving, rebuilding, after plane crash through Fairview townhomes

FAIRVIEW Ore. (KPTV) - Several families lost everything Saturday when a small plane crashed through a row of townhomes in Fairview, killing three people and displacing many others.

“It was catastrophic. That’s the only word I can use,” said Tom Keegan, who was home Saturday morning getting ready for a community pool party. He said it was a beautiful day until the unthinkable happened.

“There was just this terrible, terrible sound, I can’t even describe it,” Keegan recalled. “I saw a bunch of insulation and smoke; I stood up to see what that was and that’s when the explosion occurred. It threw me into the wall and consequently into the bathtub. I turned around and the whole room was filled with smoke and insulation, it was like a snowstorm.”

A Cessna 421C aircraft fell out of the sky and through his and his neighbors’ townhomes in Fairview Terrace, two miles from where it took off at Troutdale Airport.

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“‘What is going on? What is this?’ I actually thought that I was probably going to die,” Keegan said he struggled to process the disaster as it happened. “Then, the explosion, everything kind of calmed down for a minute, and went quiet, I stood up and I looked back in my bedroom and it was full of fire.”

Three people were killed: the plane’s two passengers and Keegan’s friend and neighbor, Barbara MacDonald.

“[She] was sleeping at the time, she had trouble sleeping the night before,” Keegan said.

All Keegan knew was to escape the flames. Barefoot, he made his way to the street and reunited with his wife Judy, who had been setting up at the neighborhood pool when she saw the plane go down. He was soon taken to the hospital for monitoring.

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Meanwhile, two homes over, Kim Williams and her 7-year-old daughter Morgan were heading home from the coast when they got the call their townhome was burning. Kim’s sister was trying to get in the home to rescue her three cats.

“I’m just frozen, and I’m trying to remember this code that I rarely use,” Kim said. She got to the townhomes a couple hours after the fire had started.

“I just collapsed,” she said, emotional. “I got to the grass across the street from my house and I just fell on the ground, sobbing… You never, ever think this is going to happen to you. Later that day I got a start-your-life-over garbage bag from the Red Cross.”

Kim said it’s a miracle her cats survived; one of them had been thrown from the explosion.

“The theory is that he was flown out of the third-level window and landed on the grass across the street,” she said. “His whiskers got a little charred….it’s crazy.”

Their other two cats were found the next day, hiding in the remnants of the home.

Now, these families have to rebuild, heal, and grieve all at once.

“I was really proud of my community and really sad for Barb,” Keegan said. “She was one of the mainstays here, she kept the clubhouse clean, she was a personality, made a beautiful yard…she’ll be sorely missed.”

Both Tom and Judy Keegan and Kim and Morgan Williams have GoFundMe pages set up to help them recover.

The crash remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.