ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 30, 1996 TAG: 9601300091
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NASHVILLE, TENN.
SOURCE: Associated Press
A Navy F-14 fighter jet heavy with fuel crashed in a huge fireball Monday, demolishing three houses and killing five people. The pilot had been involved in a previous accident.
Three of the dead were in a house that took a direct hit from the Tomcat, as the F-14 is known. The others killed were the plane's two-member crew.
The Navy identified the pilot as Lt. Cmdr. John Stacy Bates, 33, originally of Chattanooga. The radar interceptor officer was identified as Lt. Graham Alden Higgins, 28, from Dover-Foxcroft, Maine.
Neither ejected before the crash.
Bates was involved in a crash off the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln last spring, Navy officials said. His fighter squadron, VF 213, has had four accidents in the last 16 months, including the October 1994 fatal crash involving Lt. Kara Hultgreen, one of the first women to qualify for a Navy combat aviation assignment.
The squadron was transferred to the USS Kitty Hawk in October.
The fighter had taken off from Nashville International Airport on a training mission, returning to its base at Miramar Naval Air Station near San Diego.
The fireball could be seen for miles from the wooded, working-class neighborhood of brick homes where the crash occurred under overcast skies.
``One guy was just sitting in his couch. He never had a chance. They were all just sitting where they were,'' firefighter James Dean said.
The fighter jet hit one house, engulfing homes on either side in flames and littering the neighborhood with plane parts. Pieces of an engine sat in in a yard across the street; another part of the plane rested in a tree.
``It was moving so fast I couldn't even tell what shape it was, and then this huge fireball erupted and the heat came through the glass of my car,'' said Don Isert, who was driving near the airport.
Stasi Stubblefield, who lives a half-mile from where the plane crashed, said: ``It looked like it was going directly down ... nose down.''
The cause of the crash was not immediately known.
Elmer Newsom, 66, and his wife, Ada Newsom, 63, were killed in their home, police said. A visiting friend, Ewing T. Wair, 53, also was killed.
Kenny Newsom, 37, left work as soon as he heard about the crash but said he knew his parents were dead as soon as he saw their flattened house.
The couple were next-door neighbors of Joel and Anita Oeschle, who left for work well before the crash and whose house was destroyed by the fire.
``I feel very fortunate that neither of us was home,'' Joel Oeschle said. ``We lost two great neighbors, two great people. That's where my heart is now.''
Neva Hammonds said a piece of the engine landed in her front yard, a half-mile from the crash site, which is 2 1/2 miles south of Nashville's airport.
According to the Navy, this was the 30th crash of an F-14 since 1991, including 11 in 1993, five in 1994 and seven in 1995.
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. A rescue worker stands amid the flames and rubbleafter a Navy F-14 fighter crashed into three homes near Nashville,
Tenn., Monday morning. color. by CNB