Doctor and tireless volunteer Kerry Telford and her infant daughter Sarah were among the six people who perished in Sunday’s float-plane crash near Saturna Island.
The B.C. Coroners Service confirmed the identities of the other four victims Monday as Richard Haskitt and Cindy Schafer of Huntington Beach, Calif., Catherine White-Holman of Vancouver and Thomas Glenn of White Rock. Telford, who is listed by the coroner as Kerry Margaret Morrissey, was 41, and her daughter Sarah Grace Morrissey was six months old.
Telford’s husband, Patrick Morrissey, and their other daughter, Claire, 3, were not on the plane.
Telford had recently returned from maternity leave to work at the South Community Birth Program, a midwifery clinic in south Vancouver’s mainly Indo-Canadian community. She trained students at the clinic in midwifery and nursing.
“The whole team is devastated,” Linda Allen said from the clinic Monday.
“We loved her to death and the baby, her husband and her little girl, too.”
Telford was working part-time with a team of doctors and midwives. Another physician was called in to continue medical service at the clinic because regular staff were too upset to work.
“The rest of our team can’t come in,” Allen said.
Telford had worked at the Bridge Clinic for refugees in Vancouver since 2001, according to Chris Friesen, director of settlement services for the Immigrant Services Society. Bridge staff, doctors and social workers gathered at the clinic Monday afternoon to remember their colleague.
“Kerry was an extraordinary person,” Friesen said. “She seemed to have an inner light.
“She really did a lot to make the lives of refugees arriving in Vancouver better.”
Bridge Clinic staff talked about ways to memorialize Telford. “We want to do something that reflects what an amazing person she was and to help her three-year-old daughter know her,” Friesen said.
Telford recently spent nine months at a tiny hospital run by two Catholic priest-physicians in the Peruvian jungle, near the village of Santa Clotilde. Telford had volunteered at the Centro de Salud Santa Clotilde for several months-long stretches over the past nine years.
She had worked as a clinical associate with the St. Paul’s Hospital HIV service and as a clinical instructor at the UBC department of family practice.
Haskitt, a district manager with Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and Schafer, a photographer, lived in California, but purchased a cottage on Saturna about six years ago.
“They selected Saturna because of its unique characteristics,” Haskitt’s father, Dick, said in a phone interview from his home in Redmond, Wash.
“It was the opposite of their life in southern California; it was uncommercialized. That’s the place to which they would retreat whenever they would have a long weekend.”
The couple had a small ownership share with a group of others in the Lighthouse Pub on Saturna. They were married about 15 years ago, and had no children.
While Haskitt grew up in California, Schafer was from Ontario. They both loved to travel, Haskitt’s father said.
“They enjoyed going to places people wouldn’t go ordinarily,” Dick Haskitt said. “They enjoyed the small towns, the villages and getting away from the crowds … talking to the local people and trying to absorb as much of the real culture of the place as possible.”
He said he and his wife, who have one other son, were devastated by their loss.
“Just to be confronted with something like this that we’ve never contemplated – it’s so shocking,” Haskitt said. “We’re having a great deal of difficulty even accepting it.
Catherine White-Holman has been a social worker at Vancouver Coastal Health’s Three Bridges Community Health Centre.
Sandra Laframboise, a retired nurse and advocate for the transgendered community, said she didn’t personally know White-Holman but that she had helped a lot of people in the transgendered community. “She was a strong advocate for the community.”
Bodies of the six victims were recovered Monday morning from the six-seat piston-engine de Havilland Beaver that crashed Sunday afternoon soon after taking off from Saturna Island.
A Coast Guard dive team at Lyall Harbour on Saturna Island found the aircraft with the bodies inside shortly before 1 a.m. Monday at a depth of 11 metres, said Troy Haddock, maritime coordinator for the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Victoria.
Rescuers had a difficult time finding the plane because of near-zero visibility in the water and strong currents, he said.
Two people – a male pilot and a female passenger – were rescued and taken to hospital shortly after the plane crashed. Their names have not been released.
They were rescued by locals who saw the crash, jumped into their boats and raced out to the plane as it quickly sank into the waters off the island, nestled between the mainland and Vancouver Island.
Every member of the Outer Gulf Islands RCMP detachment worked through the night on the search-and-rescue operation and aided in contacting the families of the deceased, according to RCMP spokesman Cpl. Darren Lagans. Officers from Sidney and North Saanich arrived Monday morning to assume local policing duties and support the investigation.
The RCMP have secured the area of the crash while Transportation Safety Board investigators supervise the recovery of the wreckage. Counselling was offered to members of the investigation team and to the private citizens who helped in the rescue effort.
Lagans said rescuers and officials were shaken by the experience of recovering the infant.
“For most of us who have kids that is the most difficult part of the operation. There is no tragedy that comes closer to home,” Lagans said. “We have put a call for anyone who is having difficulty with it to call victims’ services.
“You’ve got a very intense period of a few hours where you are working and you are not processing emotionally,” he said. “We have services for our members, but for some of the search and rescue crews and the citizens who got in their boats and went out to help, they don’t necessarily have that.”
The island’s 350 permanent residents were reeling from the shock of so many deaths at once in their tiny community.
“We’re very tired and sad and we are not ready to talk about it,” said a woman at the Saturna General Store. The store includes a cafe and the island’s shipping service and serves as a social hub for many locals.
Seair Seaplanes suspended all operations Monday. “Out of respect for family and friends, we have suspended service for today (Monday),” said Sarah Mansfield, a dispatcher for the Richmond-based company.
Seair president Peter Clarke and operations manager Terry Hiebert met with the Transportation Safety Board investigation team Monday morning.
Clarke issued a short statement to say that Seair Seaplanes was cooperating fully with the investigation, directing all inquiries to the TSB lead investigator Bill Yearwood.
“Our primary concern right now is for the passengers, their family and pilot on board the flight and our employees,” Clarke said in the statement.
“Throughout our 28 years of providing float plane service to British Columbians, our first priority has always been the safety and wellbeing of our passengers and employees,” he wrote. “We maintain our fleet of ten aircraft to the highest standards and our pilots are among the best in the industry.
“At this time, our focus remains on providing support to the survivors and to the families of those whom we lost in this tragic accident.”
Seair co-owner Christy Clarke said the pilot has been flying full-time with Seair for the last three years.
“Hopefully, we will be able to talk to the survivors to determine if they know what caused this,” Yearwood said. “They may have the best information as to what happened.”
The TSB will examine the wreckage of the plane, but small aircraft don’t have black boxes or recordings that can give a sense of what has happened when there is a crash.
The plane was making a scheduled flight to Vancouver airport. It had picked up passengers on Mayne and Pender islands before its final stop at Saturna.
Allen Olsen was in the nearby pub watching the Grey Cup game and visiting with friends when he heard someone shout, “It crashed!”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Olsen said. “The plane was in the water, with the nose in the water and one wing up in the air.”
Olsen jumped into his sailboat and motored as quickly as he could across the harbour to the site, as did several other boaters.
In the three or four minutes it took to get there, the plane had sunk under the water.
An aluminum boat and an inflatable boat got to the scene first. When Olsen got there, the rescuers were struggling to pull two people from the water, the pilot and one passenger.
“They were conscious. The pilot was in a lot of pain,” Olsen said. The two were pulled into the boats and taken to the nearby government dock.
Olsen knew the California couple who boarded the plane at Saturna, but didn’t want to name them. They were later identified as Haskitt and Schafer.
According to its website, Seair Seaplanes incorporated in 1980 and began a business associated with aircraft chartering, maintenance and servicing. It then launched a scheduled service to the Gulf Islands, providing customers with eight flights daily and service to Nanaimo with up to 10 flights per day.
With files from Canwest News Service and Richard J. Dalton Jr., Vancouver Sun
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