"I Protected Her": Girl, 4, Shields Sister in Fiery Plane Wreck

"We were a little bit scared of the accident, and I took good care of my sister," Grace Pearson said at a news conference at a St. Paul, Minn., hospital, where she told her amazing survival story Wednesday with help from her dad.

The Aug. 28 plane crash occurred around 11 a.m. near Grand Marais, Minn., on the shores of Lake Superior. The girls' mother, Kathryn Ann Pearson, 36, and their uncle, Charles William Erickson, 55, were declared dead at the scene.

The group had set out from Duluth, Minn., and Erickson had been piloting the plane toward Grand Marais in thick fog when the crash happened. Doctors say it is nothing short of a miracle that the girls survived.

"There is no medical explanation for their survival," said Dr. David Ahrenholz, associate medical director at Regions Hospital Burn Center, where the sisters are still recovering.

The girls were both burned in the crash and subsequent fire. Lily suffered third-degree burns on her arms, legs and right side of her face, and has been breathing with the help of a tube. She has undergone surgeries for the burns, and more treatment is expected. Grace suffered third-degree burns on her hands and a broken leg in the crash

But the prognosis for both of the children is good. Grace is credited with keeping herself and her sister away from the smoldering plane and its toxic smoke.

Grace said that she knew her mother and her uncle were dead. But she kept Lily away from the wreckage. The little girls rested on the remains of a seat from the plane while rescue crews searched for them for five hours.

The search for the plane began when Federal Aviation Administration notified the local sheriff's department shortly after 11 a.m. that the aircraft was missing. A local pilot was able to get into the air briefly during a break in the weather, and spotted the wreckage in a wooded area outside of Grand Marais at about 4 p.m.

The plane had been headed toward Grand Marais, and from there, the family was planning to take a car trip to their annual Labor Day weekend reunion at a lake on the Canadian border where they would meet Toby Pearson.

For now, Toby Pearson says he is focused on the miracle that saved his daughters.

"The tragedy of the loss is difficult to deal with … but at the same time the miraculous survival is amazing," he said.

"She keeps me grounded," he said. "She brings me back to what it's all about, and the need to keep moving forward."

More Info on the Girls' Conditions

Posted on Wed, Sep. 17, 2003

Nick Coleman: 'We were a little scared'
NICK COLEMAN
Pioneer Press Columnist

When he can find the energy, Toby Pearson jogs along Summit Avenue these days, running from Regions Hospital up the hill past the Cathedral of St. Paul and back down again, trying to figure out what to do now with his life, and the lives of his little girls.

The past three weeks have been too much. So as he runs, he tries to clear his head.

"There's a hole in the middle of my life and I don't know where I go next," he says. "The days all blend together and it's hard to keep them separate. So when I run, I wish life was as simple as just putting one foot in front of the other. I don't know if there's a support group for men whose wives die in plane crashes and leave them with two little girls."

He is smiling as he says that, a smile that is warm but weary, more exhausted than expressive. Toby Pearson's path has been hard since Aug. 28, when a light plane carrying his wife, Kathryn, and the couple's young daughters, 4-year-old Grace and 3-year-old Lily, crashed into the woods near Grand Marais. Toby, 37, is a Duluth-based organizer for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and would have been on the plane except for a balky computer that had left him behind on his work and kept him in the office.

He had made breakfast for the family and kissed them goodbye, planning to drive to Saganaga Lake later in the day to join Kathryn and the girls at a family reunion. They were taking a short flight up the North Shore in a plane piloted by the girls' uncle and Kathryn's brother-in-law Charles Erickson, 55, of Minneapolis. Toby was making a routine phone call when he was passed a note that his mother-in-law, Marilyn, was trying to reach him. He thought he was going to hear that Kathryn had forgot to bring the roast turkey and that he should make sure to bring it with him when he headed up the shore. Instead, he learned his family had disappeared.

The plane, hampered by heavy fog, overshot the Grand Marais airport, pulled up into the mist and vanished. Toby spent the afternoon making frantic phone calls to airports, sheriff's offices and relatives, trying to find out why the plane was overdue.

"I was in denial, the rational side of me, trying to keep from jumping to conclusions, trying to avoid wailing and gnashing of teeth," he says.

Four hours passed before another pilot, braving the fog, peeked through a hole in the clouds and spotted the plane's smoking wreckage. Rescue teams, reaching the site on foot and expecting no survivors, were amazed to find that the girls' bench seat had broken loose and been thrown free of the blazing crash — hurling the girls, still in their seat belts, into the clear and into a changed life.

The news wasn't the worst that Toby Pearson had feared. But it wasn't the best he had prayed for. Kathryn, 36, was dead, along with Erickson, but the girls, although injured, had survived.

"It's an incredible emotional roller coaster to hear those two things in the same sentence," he says, shaking his head as if he still is trying to sort it out. "If anybody has any good ideas how to process this, I'd be open to them," he says, cracking a smile that seems more exhausted than humorous. "I'm pretty much making this up as I go along."

Since the crash, Pearson has slept on hospital cots and lived in hospital corridors, shuffling from the bedside of one daughter to another, tucking Lily in for the night, then helping Grace fall asleep, working double overtime as parent to children who are fighting to recover their health and go on to find a new normal in a life without a mom.

Grace, clutching a good-witch doll she has named Glenda, appeared with her father Tuesday at Regions Hospital, where she and Lily are undergoing skin grafts to repair their burns. Grace, who suffered burns on her hands and left ankle and who also broke her right leg, may be released from the hospital as early as today and go to stay with Pearson's parents near Mankato. Lily, more severely burned on her legs, face and forehead, remains in intensive care and is likely to spend another month or so in the hospital. She underwent a third skin graft Tuesday, and is expected to receive another next week. Both girls are expected to recover fully from their injuries.

"This doesn't happen very often," Dr. David Ahrenholz, associate medical director of the hospital's burn center, said of the girls' survival. "There's no obvious medical explanation for why they survived."

"I'm feeling good," Grace said Tuesday before burying her face shyly in her father's chest. "We were a little scared, and I took good care of my sister."

Lily, whose given name is Elizabeth, had tried to leave the crash site and go home. But Grace, a year older, knew they should stay put until help came and should stay away from the fire. Grace also knew, she told her dad later, that her mother was dead.

"Gracie told me, 'Mommy is with Jesus, and it makes me sad,' " says her father. "That's where she's at. Lily hasn't been able to talk much, but I have told her, just so she would know why her mom's not coming to see her, that Mom's with Jesus. To what extent a 3-year-old understands, I don't know.

"I've been told they're going to have some post-traumatic stress symptoms — something will come along and trigger a response. Hopefully, we can do as good a job as we can so they can adjust. But it's tough. They're going to be without their mom, an amazing person who loved them deeply and made everyone around them a better person. I'm not sure you can make up for that."

Toby had just finished law school and moved to Duluth when he first saw Kathryn Wall, who was then a waitress at Grandma's Restaurant in Canal Park.

"The first time I saw her, I told my friends, 'I think that's the woman I am going to marry.' I don't know why I said it. I had never thought of getting married before. I was still young and foolish."

He was also prescient. Kathryn and Toby started dating. They were married in 1991. Over the course of their marriage, and in the manner they chose to raise their girls, they committed themselves to trying to make the world a better place, Toby with his work for the Rural Life Conference, Kathryn as a nurse who hoped one day — after the kids were raised — to work in a medical clinic in a developing country.

"She was easy with a smile and quick with a laugh," says Toby. "She was fun and loved being outside and she was smart and, obviously, I think she was the best woman in the world, because I asked her to marry me, and she said yes."

Like his daughters, Toby is trying to cope with losing her. Jogging — something he and Kathryn often did together along the Lake Superior shore — is the only therapy he has time for now, between all the demands of caring for the girls.

"I have a bit of anger about the whole thing," he says, smiling again. "Why her? Why now?"

I ask him about his own easy smile. He tells me it's part defensive mechanism — a way of holding the pain at bay — and partly a reflection of his confidence that his little girl Grace is right: that Kathryn is with God now, even though Toby says she is probably grilling heaven's boards of directors about why they do things the way they do.

"People tell me there's a reason the girls survived and that they're meant to do X, Y or Z — that we don't know what it is but that there's some reason they survived. Well, they are special. But I still think Kathryn had a reason to be around. That's the hard part for me, the difficult part. I have my moments of outrage and I do my fair share of crying, but I take comfort in what I believe about where she is. It doesn't make it easier to deal with when the anger part of the grieving process kicks in. But it helps me with the day-to-day ups and downs. I feel like I'm just running to stand still.

"It's going to be a long road. It's not an event. It's a journey. And I'm only at the start."

Sermons from St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church

THE FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST - September 21, 2003

"Amazing Grace Heroes"

Texts: James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

Grace sat in his lap--not in the arms of Jesus this time, but in the arms of her father. Grace Pearson is four years old. She's a little girl wearing a flourescent pink cast on her leg. Her hands are bandaged because she'd been burned so severely she needed skin grafts. You may have seen her in the news this week. She's hurt, but not as badly as her three year old sister, Lilly, who is still in intensive care.

Grace and Lilly are the miracle survivors of a plane crash near Grand Marais, MN on August 28. The girls' mother and uncle were killed in the crash. No one knows how Grace and Lilly survived, but they did. They were thrown from the plane. I imagine that they were held in the arms of God on that day as Grace was held in her father's arms at a press conference this week.

The Star Tribune front page on Wednesday had a large picture of Grace and her Dad with the caption "Amazing Grace." "Amazing Grace" is a song many of us know from memory. It's about the grace of God, reaching out to hold us, to surround us in the arms of God, the way Jesus held a little child before the disciples in our reading from the Gospel of Mark. "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all," Jesus said. "And whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me and not only me but the one who sent me.

While they were walking on the road, the disciples had been arguing about who among them was the greatest. It appears they were unaware that Jesus had overheard their conversation. When they reached the house in Capernaum, Jesus asked them: "What were you talking about on the way here?" And like children under scrutiny, they were silent.

Like the disciples, who are slow to understand Jesus' teachings, often we don't get it either. We are silent sometimes when asked about our faith.

We don't know what to do with God. We want a great God. Not just a great God, but the greatest God. We want a super-hero God. At the very least one who does magic. We want a God who conquers by might and power, a God who could not be killed by anyone.

But that's not what we got. Our Christ embraced what appeared to be a weak role--the role of sacrificing life in order to accomplish something so large that we find it hard to grasp the scope of it. We did not get a super-hero God, but we have God who knows human suffering from firsthand experience.

God's world seems upside down; totally out of sync with our human understandings of greatness. In God's realm, greatness is not defined by wealth, power, or prestige. Greatness is defined by service. To make the point, Jesus brings a child into the midst of the disciples.

"What were you arguing about on the way?" Jesus asked. And they were silent. In so many ways, we are still debating just who is the greatest. Even if we have enough humility to think it is not ourselves, we focus on others we feel are the greatest among us, lifting up heroes in sports, movies, and politics, whoever seems bigger than life. But it is the everyday acts of courage and kindness that make a difference.

God turns our expectations of greatness upside down, especially in the midst of our individualistic culture. It is not just personal salvation, not just "Me and Jesus," that matters. Greatness marks the ones who take community seriously and seek to be servants of all.

We are given God's powerful blessing to become the children of God, those who are here to act on God's behalf. Each of us stands as a child before God, loved and welcomed. And each of us has the chance to extend that love so that all are cared for in community. Each of us has the chance to be a hero for somebody, to act in ways that will leave a legacy of caring, welcoming the little ones and the strangers among us.

Four year old Grace Pearson is a hero in my book--truly one of "the least of these" of whom Jesus spoke. Grace said her sister was scared and wanted to go home. Grace knew that her Mother and her Uncle Charlie weren't able to help them. So she protected Lilly. Four years old and she told Lilly, "We can't go home." So those two little girls climbed onto an airplane seat in the midst of a plane wreck in the woods and held each other. Even with her own injuries, Grace protected Lilly. Five hours after the crash, they were found--amazingly, they were found alive.

These sisters were found because someone else was a hero that day. Another pilot flew through the fog that had taken down one plane in order to search for the wreckage. He did not know Grace and Lilly's family, but risked himself to search. And two little children are with their father and beginning to heal because this pilot spotted their location. Who knows what might have happened if the girls would have been exposed in the North woods overnight.

Accidents. Miracles. They make us think about what is really important. Stories like that of amazing little Grace protecting her sister help us evaluate what our goals are.

I've been thinking about heroes, about people who are role models for me. They are the folks who have never won awards for heroism. Folks who have never had an article about them in the newspaper. But they have modeled for me and others what faith is about--grandparents who care for their children and their children's children, too.

These are folks like the "Saturday Club" heroes--the ones who fix and paint, repair and renew this place month after month. They are the heroes who volunteer--stuffing and folding, counting and mailing, meeting and planning, giving someone a ride to church. Heroes help with homework and coach sports. My heroes are the ones who pray--steadfastly pray for the people of this church and this community. They are the heroes who sing and play music--even the ones who may never have a solo performance in their career--but who bring our worship to life. These are the heroes--those who teach, who care for parents in failing health, who help others back to health--nurses, physical therapists, doctors, and those who care for our pets, too.

Who are the greatest among us? They are the ones who clean the spaces we occupy. Those whose labors often go unnoticed. The greatest are the little ones who occupy these pillows for the children's sermon on Sunday mornings. And those who occupy the chairs of classrooms everywhere.

When you begin to look, the ones who are the greatest are all around us. They are everyday heroes, the people who do what they do to keep our communities whole.

Who are your heroes? Who are the greatest in your estimation? Who are the people who have shaped your life?

Our reading from the book of James begins with a question: "Who is wise and understanding among you?" According to Jesus, those who are wise are the ones who are not worried about being the greatest, but those who carry on with care for the little ones among us--whether those little ones are children or those who are vulnerable at any stage of life because of poverty, ill health, or situation of oppression.

Grace Pearson has been repeating a line from a character in a Winnie the Pooh movie, who said: "You are stronger than you think you are." Grace tells her Dad: "I am stronger than you think I am." Each of us could say the same.

God's strength is perfect in weakness. We are invited to be gentle, wise, peaceful of heart, and humble. "Draw near to God," we are told, "and God will draw near to you." Let us not be afraid to ask God to help us understand what Jesus came to teach us. When the time comes for us to answer the question: "What were you arguing about on the way?" What will we say?

Amen.

Resources: Star Tribune article about Grace Pearson by Mary Lynn Smith, 9/17/03. Emphasis and Aha! for 9/21/03.

Anita C. Hill, Pastor

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	Four-year-old Grace Pearson helped save her younger sister after surviving a small plane crash. (ABCNEWS.com)	‘I Protected Her’ 4-Year-Old Girl Shields Sister in Fiery Plane Wreck Sept. 18— After the small Beechcraft plane they were in crashed into the Minnesota wilderness, 4-year-old Grace Pearson clung to her 3-year-old sister, Lily, and kept her clear of the smoldering wreckage where their mother and uncle had perished