Freeburg couple were headed east for Thanksgiving when they died in private plane crash
An employee of a metal-fabrication company in rural Freeburg has confirmed that its owners were the two people who died in a plane crash in North Carolina over the weekend.
Joseph Kreher and his wife, Patti, of Freeburg, were headed east for the Thanksgiving Day holiday.
The employee of their company, General Machine, referred further questions to the family, which hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of late Monday morning.
A twin-engine Piper PA-30 Comanche crashed shortly after 11 a.m. Saturday in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, according to a Federal Aviation Administration news release.
The private plane went down in a residential area near the northwest corner of Winston Lake Golf Course.
The news release didn’t identify the two victims.
Susan Harrison-Bailey, who lives nearby, told a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal that she heard the crash and that the plane came to rest near the property line between her and her neighbor.
“I could see it was smashed into the trees (after the smoke cleared),” Harrison-Bailey was quoted as saying. “It landed straight up and down.”
General Machine is on Schiermeier Road, south of Belleville and northwest of Freeburg. Founded in 1958, it serves commercial and agricultural businesses in southern Illinois and St. Louis.
The Krehers had been married for 43 years, and Joseph Kreher was an experienced pilot, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“The plane took off from the St. Louis Downtown Airport (in Cahokia Heights) at 6:27 a.m. Saturday, according to Flightradar 24, a flight recording app,” the Winston-Salem Journal reported.
“The plane landed in London, Kentucky, an hour and 45 minutes later after making a loop around the airport, according to data on FlightAware.com. The plane was then rescheduled to land at 11:10 a.m. at Smith Reynolds Airport.”
An investigator told reporters at a news conference that the plane’s pilot had alerted the control tower at Smith Reynolds Airport that he was having engine trouble, the Post-Dispatch reported. The plane crashed while circling for a second attempt at landing.
The crash is being investigated by the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board.
This story was originally published November 21, 2022 at 11:42 AM.