The fourth victim who died when an electric plane built from a kit crashed in California has been identified as the son of a Zoom executive.
Isaac Zimmern, 27, was with his long-time girlfriend Emma Wilmer-Shiles when they boarded the homemade aircraft piloted by their friend, Lochie Ferrier, who also died in the crash last week along with his fiancee, Cassidy Petit.
Zimmern is the son of Johann Zimmern, 59, the head of Global Education Marketing at Zoom who lives in San Francisco’s Sunnyside neighborhood in a $1.1 million home, the International Business Times reports.
The younger Zimmern was also living in San Francisco with Wilmer-Shiles, 27, and the couple had been together for 10 years.
Zimmern had left his hometown to spend the last three years working in New York City, most recently serving as a senior operations associate for Burrow, a Brooklyn-based furniture manufacturing company, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He was identified as the fourth person who was aboard the Cozy Mark IV, a single-engine, four-seater plane that crashed last Sunday at around 4 p.m. off the coast of Half Moon Bay.
A 911 caller reported seeing it crashing toward the water after first hearing “the engine sputter,” said Sgt. Philip Hallworth of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office.
The cause of the accident remains under investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board said, noting that a preliminary report would be completed in a few weeks.
A probable cause report, however, will take between one to two years.
The Federal Aviation Administration is also involved in the investigation.
Only Wilmer-Shiles’ body has been found so far, with the US Coast Guard calling off the search-and-rescue less than a day into the operation as the “survivability” of the remaining three was unlikely, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Rescuers from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office are still conducting a search to find the bodies of Zimmern, Petit and Ferrier.
Ferrier, an Australian known in the experimental aircraft community, was an MIT graduate with a degree in aerospace engineering.
He was the owner of the doomed aircraft and recently engaged to Petit, a venture capitalist with the San Francisco-based RH Capital.
Petit had shared an engagement photo of the couple on New Year’s in front of the snowy mountains at the Grand Teton National Park, in Wyoming, her last post before the crash.
