SEATTLE — The two people who died in a small plane crash that prompted a teenage survivor to hike to safety from a rugged Washington state mountainside were killed “instantaneously or quick” and were burned beyond recognition, a deputy coroner said Thursday.
Autumn Veatch, 16, has said her step-grandparents, Leland and Sharon Bowman of Marion, Montana, were with her on the plane.
“But there was fire involved,” Skagit County Deputy Coroner Matthew Sias said, “so that has hampered us from making an identification.”
Officials will use dental records to confirm the identities, which could take about a week, Sias said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.
The cause of death was “blunt trauma,” he said, adding “the injuries we found were consistent with them perishing very quickly.”
A National Transportation Safety Board team was expected to arrive Thursday at the north-central Washington state site to investigate.
Veatch returned home to Bellingham late Tuesday.
It took her about two days to find help after the weekend crash that left her bruised and singed.
She had to make her way down a steep slope and follow a creek to a river. She spent a night on a sand bar and sipped small amounts of water.
She followed the river to a trail, and the trail to a highway where two men driving by stopped and picked her up Monday afternoon, bringing her to a general store in tiny Mazama, near the east entrance of North Cascades National Park.
Okanogan County Sheriff Frank Rogers has said she and her relatives were flying a Beechcraft A-35 from Kalispell, Montana, to Lynden, Washington, when it struck the trees, plummeted to the ground and caught fire.