Two of the Ellet residents displaced when a corporate jet crashed into their apartment building in 2015 have filed suit against the owner of the plane and the estates of the two deceased pilots.
In a filing Thursday with the Summit County Common Pleas Court, Kayleigh Scarpitti and Geoff Priebe are seeking nearly $76,000 for loss of property and unspecified punitive damages for emotional distress. The couple is represented by Orville Reed III of the Akron law firm Stark & Knoll.
Scarpitti and Priebe were living in one of the four units of a brick apartment building at 3042 Mogadore Road that were destroyed by the 10-seat Raytheon Hawker and the fire it caused when the plane crashed Nov. 10, 2015.
The plane, owned by ExecuFlight Inc. in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., was chartered by a real estate development firm looking for investment opportunities in the Midwest.
The investors were on a multistate tour and were on their way from Dayton to Akron when pilots Renato Marchese and Oscar Chavez lost control while approaching Akron Fulton International Airport.
The two pilots and seven passengers died. None of the residents of the destroyed apartment building were home when the crash occurred, and there were no deaths or injuries on the ground.
The complaint alleges the pilots were “physically unfit and not competent to safely operate” the Hawker, and they were “negligent in failing to land the plane in a reasonably safe manner.”
In October, the National Transportation Safety Board said the probable cause of the crash was the flight crew’s “mismanagement of the approach and multiple deviations from company standard operating procedures which placed the airplane in an unsafe situation.”
Federal investigators cited numerous mistakes, a “disregard for safety,” and a “casual attitude toward compliance with standards, inadequate hiring, training and operational oversight of the flight crew, and the company’s lack of formal safety program.”
The complaint filed on behalf of Scarpitti and Priebe said Execuflight is also culpable because a “checkered employment history” of the pilots was known and the company employed them anyway.
Scarpitti, a night shift nurse, had been awakened that afternoon by her dog and decided on a whim to take him to Petco.
Compounding the loss of physical property, Scarpitti has been haunted by the event since without the “fortuitous intervention of her pet dog, she would have been violently killed in her sleep,” the complaint said.
The case was assigned to Judge Joy Oldfield.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.