Four members of a family, including a toddler, were aboard a small plane that crashed in Monroe County, Illinois Tuesday afternoon. The plane is registered to a man in Fairhope, Alabama, and had left the downtown airport in Mobile earlier that day.
According to CBS affiliate KMOV in St. Louis, a man who lives near the crash scene rushed to help after the plane went down. “There was fuel leaking out of it,” he said. “My wife was already on the phone with 9-1-1. I found a fire extinguisher lying right next to it. Myself and another gentleman that stopped, we broke the windows out.”
The crash site was near Gilmore Lake Road and Floraville Road, northeast of Waterloo. The Good Samaritan described the moment they heard a child crying from inside the wreckage. “That’s when we heard the child crying,” he said. “We broke out the window and cut the seatbelt. He was in a car seat.”
The cause of the crash is under investigation. The FAA and NTSB are expected to investigate the incident.