One of the four victims of the hot air balloon crash that occurred Sunday morning in Arizona “knew he was going to die” even though he was texting his girlfriend as the balloon began its unplanned descent.
“Chayton texted [sa copine] Kinsey came down and told him, “This isn’t going to be good, I love you, goodbye,” and logged off. So his last thoughts were of his girlfriend,” Gary Wiescholek, Chayton Wiescholek’s father, told Fox17 on Tuesday.
On Sunday morning, the 28-year-old man was aboard a hot air balloon near Phoenix when an “unspecified problem” with the balloon's “shell” reportedly caused it to plummet to the ground under the confused gaze of eight skydivers had recently taken their place on board.
Among them, Chayton Wiescholek's friend Kinsey Taylor was about to jump up when she received the message from her friend, who was still on board.
“She looked at her phone and saw my son’s message. He said “I love you”. He knew he was going to die, the victim's mother, Rhonda Wiescholek, added to American media. [Je suis] deaf… just deaf. There's only so much you can do when your heart is broken.
The young woman immediately tried to call her lover back, but it was another person who picked up the phone and told her that things weren't going well and that she needed to go to him “immediately.”
“She took off her parachute harness and ran three kilometers to reach him and the authorities wouldn’t let her near him,” the victim’s father added.
The man died along with three other passengers, Kaitlynn Bartom (28), Atahan Kiliccote (24) and pilot Cornelius Van Der Walt (37), while the youngest passenger still on board, Valerie Sutterheim (23), was in hospital is said to be in critical condition.
The cause of the accident is currently under investigation and no mechanical anomalies have been found with the device, the National Transportation Safety Board said, according to The Independent.