Posted on Sat, Oct. 26, 2002

U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone dies in plane crash

BY BILL GARDNER, PHILLIP PIÑA and JIM RAGSDALE
St. Paul Pioneer Press

Joe Oden, Pioneer Press

Wellstone campaign Hmong outreach coordinator Pakou Hang weeps as she listens to speakers eulogizing Sen. Paul Wellstone and his family Friday at the campaign's St. Paul headquarters.
U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, the fiery, fist-shaking liberal fighting for a third term, was killed Friday morning along with his wife and daughter and five others when his twin-engine campaign plane, groping through snow and fog, crashed into a bog while landing in northeastern Minnesota.

The Beechcraft King Air A100 broke into several pieces and burst into flames near Eveleth, sending ripples through the nation, where the upcoming election - 11 days away - was among the most closely watched and could determine control of the Senate.

There was no hint of trouble aboard the plane, no call for help.

Federal investigators quickly flew to Minnesota and will begin at first light today to try to solve the mystery of why the aircraft slammed into the bog, 175 miles north of the Twin Cities.

The weather was dismal, gray, foggy, with light snow, but the landing should have been routine, said Gary Ulman, assistant manager of the EvelethVirginia Municipal Airport.

Shortly after 10 a.m., Ulman heard the pilot's voice on the radio and saw the landing lights flash on after the pilot clicked the signal from the cockpit.

But the plane didn't land.

"After a while, I thought to myself, 'Where the hell are they?' "

Ulman jumped into his own private plane and took off in search of the missing aircraft.
"I looked to the south and saw smoke plumes," he said.

Ulman flew over the area, thick with pine and spruce trees, and saw that the plane's tail had broken off.

"The plane was totally engulfed in fire when I found it," he said.

The path of the wreckage, about two miles southeast of the airport, suggested the pilot may have aborted the landing, Ulman said. He said the weather was overcast - with fog and light snow and a temperature of 31 - but was well within the landing limits at the airport.

Rescue crews slogged through the bog to reach the wreckage, which was still burning five hours later. Besides the tail, both wings had broken off the fuselage of the 10-seat turboprop. The bodies of the victims are expected to be removed today.

Wellstone was en route to the 11 a.m. funeral in Virginia of Martin Rukavina, father of state Rep. Tom Rukavina, DFLVirginia. The plane had left the St. Paul Downtown Airport earlier Friday morning.

As always, Wellstone was with his wife, Sheila, who was at his side every step of his political career. His daughter, Marcia, also died in the crash.

The death of the feisty 58-year-old senior senator from Minnesota shocked the United States and brought a massive outpouring of sympathy and reaction. Many Minnesotans cried when the news broke. Mourners by the hundreds gathered outside the Wellstone campaign headquarters on University Avenue in St. Paul and during a late afternoon memorial at the state Capitol.
President Bush, who had come to Minnesota recently to campaign for Wellstone's opponent, Republican Norm Coleman, offered his sympathy.

"Paul Wellstone was a man of deep convictions, a plainspoken fellow, who did his best for his state and for his country," Bush said. "May the good Lord bless those who grieve."
Wellstone was scheduled to debate Coleman and other candidates Friday night at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.

"Laurie and I first want to express our heartfelt prayers to the families of Sen. Wellstone and the other families who were involved in this terrible tragedy," said Coleman, the former mayor of St. Paul. "This is a terrible day for Minnesota."

Wellstone's junior colleague, U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton, who was in Europe, said: "Minnesota lost a courageous leader and an extraordinary human being. Paul championed so many causes and helped so many people throughout our state. He was a model and an inspiration to all of us who followed in his footsteps."

Gov. Jesse Ventura said Minnesota "has suffered a deep and penetrating loss. I had tremendous respect for Paul, and I will forever be indebted to him for his service and his ultimate sacrifice for this great democracy."

Wellstone's death threw the Nov. 5 election into turmoil. State law requires Wellstone's name to be removed from the ballot.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has until Nov. 1 to choose a successor, whose name will probably be pasted over Wellstone's on existing ballots. Ventura can appoint a short-term successor. Ventura on Friday said he would not appoint himself but otherwise declined to discuss the matter.

The others killed in the crash were Wellstone campaign aides Will McLaughlin, Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy and pilots Richard Conry and Michael Guess.

The Wellstone plane crash was the most deadly in Minnesota since Dec. 1, 1993, when 18 people were killed in Hibbing when a Northwest Airlink flight crashed three miles from the runway during a night landing.

A team of 16 National Transportation Safety Board investigators arrived at about 8 p.m., said the board's acting chairwoman, Carol Carmody, and will spend three to six days at the site before returning to Washington to continue their investigation, which likely will take months to complete.
Federal investigators were searching the crash site late Friday for the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder, Carmody said.

"There was one on the aircraft, we understand, and we're looking for that and hope that can be recovered soon," she said. Investigators also will look for the engines and other important parts of the aircraft and its systems. They will also review the weather, air traffic control, aircraft operations and human factors.

Wellstone was a diminutive battler who burst upon the state's political scene with his upset win in the 1990 Senate race. He was a Minnesota transplant who saw politics as a crusade and had a way of galvanizing friends and foes alike. He was a quintessential liberal whose zeal and fighting spirit inspired respect even among staunch conservatives.

Wellstone was a native of the Washington, D.C., suburbs. He earned a doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina and came to Minnesota to teach at Carleton College in Northfield in 1969.

Always a spellbinding speaker in the Hubert Humphrey tradition, Wellstone was both a professor and activist, involved in Minnesota's power line dispute in the 1970s, the Hormel meatpackers strike and in advocating for farmers during the farm crisis of the 1980s.

He ran unsuccessfully for state auditor in 1982 and remained in demand as a stump speaker throughout the state. He headed the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign in Minnesota.
A year later, he launched a long-shot bid for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Rudy Boschwitz. Aided by missteps by his opponent, his irrepressible energy and an innovative ad campaign, he swept to a shocking upset win.

He had much to learn in the Senate, and admittedly made some mistakes early on. By the end of his first term, the onetime firebrand was learning how to work within the slow-moving machinery of the Senate, and was proud of working with Republicans on such issues as mental health. His vote against his own president on the issue of welfare reform provided Boschwitz with a ready-made issue for their 1996 rematch.

But Wellstone energized his supporters again and held off Boschwitz for a comfortable victory.
Wellstone, developing a national reputation among liberal Democrats, launched an exploratory campaign for the presidency during his second term, but pulled out because of persistent back pain. With the Senate nearly tied, he broke an earlier pledge to serve two terms and announced his candidacy for a third term in the Senate.

Earlier this year, Wellstone, a former college wrestler who has walked with a limp for years, announced he is suffering from a mild form of multiple sclerosis.
One of his last major votes was to oppose the resolution granting Bush wide-ranging powers to make war on Iraq. Wellstone was one of the only Democrats facing tough re-election battles to vote against the president on this highly charged issue.

Sheila Wellstone, 58, leaves a legacy as her husband's best ally and a leader in the movement against domestic violence. After her husband's election to the Senate, she surprised many by becoming a bold voice for battered women, elevating a grass-roots cause the senator believed in to an issue of national importance.

In a way, she was doing a more public version of what she had done all along. Since she married Wellstone when they were both 19, she had put much of her energy into nurturing her husband's career, along with their three children.

Marcia Wellstone Markuson, 33, was a Spanish teacher at White Bear Lake High School. She had taken a leave of absence this quarter to work on her father's campaign. She lived in Apple Valley with her husband. Markuson had a son and three school-age stepchildren.

The three Wellstone aides who died were McLaughlin, 23, McEvoy, 47, and Lapic, 49.
McLaughlin worked for Wellstone since this summer as a personal assistant and aide. He was the son of the late Mike McLaughlin and his wife, Judith, two well-known figures in St. Paul politics.
McEvoy, who lived in St. Paul, was a professor of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota and the associate chairwoman of the state DFL Party.

Lapic, of Eden Prairie, was a top aide in Wellstone's St. Paul office. A former seminarian, he was a newspaper columnist when Wellstone hired him to work in the campaign.

The two men flying the plane were pilot Conry, 55, and co-pilot Guess, 30. Both men were Twin Cities residents who worked for Eden Prairie-based Executive Aviation, which provides charter and other private airlines services. Co-workers described the men as experienced pilots who often flew with Wellstone.

Earlier Friday, Wellstone and U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., went to Boston Scientific Scimed in Maple Grove to talk about a bill the two senators helped pass last week to speed up federal approval of new medical devices.

Kennedy, still in the Twin Cities when he received word of Wellstone's death, said: "All of us who knew Paul Wellstone, Sheila and Marcia are devastated today. Paul Wellstone had a passion for the good things in people and he expressed it brilliantly on the floor of the United States Senate and here in Minnesota. He was a man of enormous ability, but most of all he was a caring person.''

Paul and Sheila Wellstone, who resided in St. Paul's Cathedral Hill neighborhood, also had two sons, Paul David Wellstone II, 37, and Mark Wellstone, 30, and six grandchildren.

The elder son, who goes by "Dave," develops affordable housing by rehabbing old homes. Mark Wellstone is a Spanish teacher and soccer coach at Humboldt Senior High School in St. Paul. He recently started coaching the wrestling team at Apple Valley High School.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete. Ventura said flags at state buildings would be flown at half-staff through Nov. 5.

Staff writers Hannah Allam, Todd Nelson, Kay Harvey, Natalie Moore, Paul Tosto, John Welsh, Tom Majeski, Martin Moylan, Toni Coleman and Rachel Stassen-Berger contributed to this report.

4375755.htm