GRAY - Four people flying from Ohio to southwest Georgia were killed in a small plane crash Friday night in Jones County northeast of Macon, authorities said. <br>
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A 12-year-old girl walked away from the crash and was hospitalized. <br>
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The plane was identified by the Federal Aviation Administration as a Piper Cherokee, which crashed and burned shortly before 8 p.m. in a wooded area north of the interchange of Interstate 75 and I-16. <br>
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The single-engine, six-seater plane was headed from Columbus, Ohio, to Thomasville, Ga., about 140 miles south of Macon, FAA spokesman Christopher White said. <br>
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The girl, Kani Howard, tried unsuccessfully to pull her cousin from the wreckage, before flagging down a car and going to a store about a mile away. <br>
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``It was strange because she was so calm,'' said Bill Jackson of Town Creek Food Shop & Gas, who talked to the girl and called 911. ``I noticed she was a little distraught, so I asked her to go back and sit down. ... She told me they were all dead.'' <br>
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Jackson said Kani was wearing a gray jumpsuit, which was ripped at the left thigh, but that the girl did not appear to have serious injuries. Kani told him the victims were her mother, her aunt, her cousin and the pilot, whom she did not know. <br>
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``Other than the look in her face, and maybe leaves in her hair, the girl looked fine,'' Jackson said. <br>
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Lloyd George, chief pilot at Herbert Smart Airport in Macon, said Macon police had informed the airport that there may be a plane that was lost or running out of fuel somewhere in the area, he said. <br>
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George said he and another pilot ``tried to go find them, to try to fly them wingtip to get them back here.'' <br>
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Unable to find it in the air, he said, they climbed higher. <br>
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``Then we saw the fire about a mile north of the Wal-Mart on Gray Highway,'' George said. <br>
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Jones County sheriff's dispatcher Steven Smith said he could confirm the four fatalities but provide no other information. <br>
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At the Medical Center of Central Georgia, one person was brought in for treatment just before 10 p.m. but Xavier Parks, a patient representative, said there was no other information available.
