RHODES POINT, Md. — Search crews recovered the body of a Sequim-area woman Monday, the victim of a small plane crash over the weekend, from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, police said.
Mary L. Lagerquist, 78, who lived on Hooker Road south of Carlsborg, had been a passenger in a plane piloted by her son, Lanson C. Ross III, 48, of Fort Washington, Md., a Washington, D.C., suburb.
Police said Ross watched helplessly as his mother drowned as they were trying to swim from the wreckage site to an island in the chilly waters of Chesapeake Bay.
Ross, an Air Force pilot, told investigators that the two-seat, single-engine aircraft lost power and that he was trying to reach an island near the south entrance of the sprawling bay, Smith Island.
Soon after his 3:30 p.m. Sunday distress call to Patuxent River Naval Air Station, he was forced to ditch the plane into the bay.
The small plane — identified as possibly a 1948 Temco Globe GC-1 Swift — sank rapidly, but both Ross and his mother, who was injured in the crash, were able to get out of the wreckage, police said.
The two were attempting to swim together toward shore in rough, chilly waters, but after about a mile, she could not continue, police said.
Her body was recovered off the southern end of Smith Island about 9 a.m. EDT Monday, state police said.
“He was helping her swim through rough seas with waves up to 5 feet and temperatures in the low 60s,” said Maryland State Police spokesman Greg Shipley.
“You can only imagine how difficult that was.”
Ross made it to shore about 8 p.m. and was taken to Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury, Md., where he was treated and released.
The plane has not been located.
The mother and son were flying back to Hyde Field in Clinton, Md., after an excursion to Tangier Island on Sunday when the plane developed problems.
Soon after the craft disappeared from radar about three miles off the southwest side of the island in Somerset County, the Coast Guard, Maryland Natural Resources Police and Virginia Marine Police conducted water and air searches of the area.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the crash and recovering the plane.
A June 2003 Peninsula Daily News interview with Lagerquist focused on her undergoing successful eye surgery — conductive keratoplasty — a relatively new surgical technique then that transformed her vision from a state of severe farsightedness to virtual perfection.
Lagerquist was about to turn 70 at the time.
She was a mother of two and grandmother of four who moved from Gig Harbor to the Sequim area in late 2001 to live near her sister, Lyla Stoike.
Her husband, George, at the time had Alzheimer’s disease and lived in a care facility in Gig Harbor.
Lagerquist played music — the marimba — on a professional basis, since she was a teenager.
She said she enjoyed a breathtaking 360-degree view of the Dungeness Valley from her log home in the hills above Carlsborg.
Attempts to contact her sister Monday were unsuccessful.
