By Scott Thistle

and Mary Delamater,Sun Journal Staff

NEWRY – For a second long day, crews struggled against the steep and densely forested Barker Mountain on Friday to bring down the remains of four people killed in a plane crash the day before.

“This is the closest thing to a jungle that we have in Maine is what one of the wardens on the mountain told me this morning,” said Mark Latti, a spokesman for the Maine Warden Service.

The bodies of those killed were off the mountain at about 6:30 p.m. Friday, Oxford County Sheriff Lloyd “Skip” Herrick said. They were taken to the state’s Medical Examiner’s Office in Augusta for positive identification, cause of death, and notification to families, he said.

Three of the dead were from Lewiston High School, all members of the school’s Air Force Junior ROTC program. The students were among a group from the school participating in an annual summer camp program at Bog Brook training site off Route 2 in Gilead. As part of that experience, they received an introductory flight lesson from certified flight instructor Charlie Weir of Twin Cities Air Service in Auburn. The students were picked up at the Bethel Regional Airport, about two miles by air from where they crashed.

Five game wardens and six rescuers reached the crash site Thursday about 8 p.m. confirming there were no survivors, but darkness and terrain prevented them from doing more at that time, Oxford County Chief Deputy Jim Davis said.

The decision to call off recovery operations Thursday night was made to prevent any injury to those working to bring out the bodies, Davis said.

Crews did secure the area for Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigators who reached the site about 1 p.m. Friday.

Joining those federal investigators was a state medical examiner.

The crash caused a small fire, but it was unclear whether that contributed to being unable to identify the victims on the mountain. “There was a fire at the location, but to what extent that factors into it, I can’t say,” Davis said.

As of Friday, the crash site had been turned over to the NTSB for further investigation. “It’s their scene from the standpoint of the crash, and it could be several days, at best, in determining the cause,” Davis said.

Herrick said Todd Gunther, primary investigator for the NTSB, and representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration and Cessna aircraft manufacturing company will be taken to the crash site today by Maine Warden Service officer Norm Lewis of Greenwood.

“They’ll be taken back up there tomorrow,” he said.

Herrick said none of the personnel involved in the search and recovery effort suffered any injuries, as far as he knew.

Herrick said three of his deputies, led by Sgt. Matthew Baker, were on the 12- to 14-member recovery crew Friday. “When they returned, they looked extremely tired,” he said.

He said Baker, who turned the investigation over to the NTSB after the bodies were off the mountain, told him the “last six-tenths of a mile was all uphill and very, very tough terrain.”

Herrick estimated the crash site is 1 to two air miles from the airport where the 1979 four-seater Cessna 172 took off late Thursday afternoon. He said Baker told him it was tough to measure the land distance from the airport to the scene – he guessed it was about 2 miles in all – because of the terrain and thickly forested land they had to bushwhack over the last three-quarters of a mile or so.

The sheriff said none of his deputies described what they saw at the site or shared emotional reactions.

Baker, whose birthday was Friday, was unavailable for comment Friday night, Herrick said.

Baker, whose birthday was Friday, was unavailable for comment Friday night, Herrick said.

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection was called in Friday to investigate whether fuel and hydraulic fluid from the wrecked aircraft had spilled into a small stream leading to Chapman Brook, Davis said. Public safety officials were worried chemicals or fuel from the plane might pollute the brook, which feeds into the town of Bethel’s water supply, Davis said.

As many as 40 people were involved in the recovery effort, including volunteers from a local mountain rescue group, as well as Bethel public safety workers and local ambulance crews. About 30 were actually working on the mountain, Davis said.

He listed several agencies by name, but said he was hesitant to leave one out. So far, the cooperative effort was going as well as could be expected, considering the location, he said.

No recovery crew member had been seriously injured as of Friday afternoon, Davis said. An additional crew using a chain saw began work on the trail blazed by the initial response team to make it more suitable for safely carrying gurneys to a point where they could be loaded onto all-terrain vehicles. The trail blazed by recovery crews was estimated to be between a half-mile to three-quarters of a mile long.

“I wasn’t up there myself, but from what I’ve heard, it is very thick and a long ways from where they could get with ATVs,” Davis said.

Several fire, rescue and ambulance crews were also standing by at the Bethel airport in case they were needed by recovery crew workers, Davis said.

Bethel firefighters were also guarding the gates to the airfield, which was closed to all but government or recovery operation aircraft Friday.

Local residents were certainly feeling for the families of those lost, said Dan Kennagh, the assistant airport manager.

“It’s a tragic, tragic thing. That’s for damn sure,” Kennagh said.

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