Alta Journal is pleased to present the final installment of a six-part series by writer Benjamin Cassidy. Read all the installments here.
The seaplane is an icon of the Pacific Northwest. Small aircraft launch and land regularly on the placid waters that lap against its major cities and destination isles, serving as quaint reminders of both the region’s rich aviation history and its majestic, fragmented geography. But on Labor Day weekend in 2022, in the most tranquil of settings, one such aircraft ferried its passengers to the most tragic of ends. Shortly after takeoff from idyllic San Juan Island, a de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter bound for the Seattle area nose-dived into Puget Sound, killing all 10 people and an unborn baby on board.
The flight carried a remarkably eclectic group of passengers, among them a seasoned civil rights activist, a popular winemaker, and a young lawyer. Their deaths sent shock waves up and down the entire West Coast, from Southern California to the northwest corner of Washington State, and as far as Minnesota. Who were these people, and what can we learn from their lives—and their deaths? In Part Five, Cassidy told the story of the crash.
During the last years of her life, Sandy Williams often talked about the three pillars of her advocacy work in Spokane: the Black Lens newspaper, which had, since 2015, sought to publish stories overlooked by mainstream media; the Carl Maxey Center, a gathering space and resource hub for the city’s Black community; and a yet-to-be-launched justice center, which would provide free legal aid to help combat racial inequities.
When a seaplane carrying Williams crashed into Mutiny Bay off the coast of Whidbey Island on September 4, 2022, it threatened to crumble all three of those pillars. The loss of her and her partner, Pat Hicks, left those who worked alongside her in Spokane reeling. “We were in a fog for a while,” says city council president Betsy Wilkerson, an early member of the Carl Maxey Center’s board and a close friend of Williams’s.
But if you cared about Williams, Wilkerson told others, the work had to continue. The state named its ongoing effort to bolster communities harmed by highways the Sandy Williams Connecting Communities Program. And at the Maxey Center, mourning eventually progressed to actions, both big and small. Williams wasn’t a delegator, which meant they’d lost more than just her clear-eyed vision: They had to figure out how to access her email accounts and other systems.
Williams’s brother, Rick, who served as the center’s interim executive director, and her daughter, Renika, a board member, helped preserve Williams’s long-term plans. In April 2023, the Sandy Williams Justice Center opened with a free walk-in legal clinic, and it has since served hundreds within the community. Game days, a Williams favorite, have continued; Williams’s mother, Wilhelmenia, hosts bingo. And the organization is now raising funds for the center’s third stage of renovations, a patio where community members can share coffee and conversation—a gathering space, Renika says, that her mother always wanted.
Across from a vibrant portrait of Williams at the center sits a magazine rack with fresh copies of the Black Lens. After a two-year hiatus, the newspaper returned in February 2024, only a year later than Williams had intended. The monthly editions retain their independent voice but are now backed by a nonprofit and the Spokesman-Review, which assists in their production and dissemination. Renika helps design the paper.
“A massive effort is underway to help Spokane create one of the first large-scale, community-funded and community-owned news organizations of this type in the nation,” Spokesman-Review editor Rob Curley said in the run-up to the newspaper’s relaunch. “That the Black Lens would be so integral to making that happen is a testament to the power and importance of Sandy’s vision and mission.”
Still, her daughter stresses, perhaps more challenging than achieving her mother’s vision is mirroring her integrity. “She was diplomatic but still rebellious and able to convince people of the right thing,” Renika says.
And beyond her unique perspective, some friends worry that another key to Williams’s success is being overlooked: her relationship with Hicks. At celebrations of her life, “I felt like they were almost trying to hide that Sandy and Pat were a couple, or [imply] Pat wasn’t as important as Sandy,” says Pam Wilson, a close friend who helped bundle copies of the Black Lens with her husband, Curtis Hampton.
Hicks added levity and adventure to Williams’s life, but she was also the strong “matriarch” of her own family after her mother got sick, according to her brother, Sam. Their sisters and mother died in just a two-year span between the start of COVID-19 and the seaplane crash. At the same time, the weight of her family responsibilities didn’t keep Hicks from pursuing her dreams of traveling around the country. “She was working on her bucket list, so she was going everywhere,” Sam marvels.
For Hampton, the news of Williams’s and Hicks’s sudden deaths left him wondering if they’d had enough time to say they loved each other on the plane, to hold each other’s hands. For another friend, Sylvia Brown, the thought offered her solace in the aftermath.
“Neither one of them was alone,” Brown says. “They would have had each other.”
Gabby Hanna was flying on her own, but the 29-year-old’s memorial service reinforced that she hadn’t traveled through life that way. Her class of associates at Cooley LLP attended en masse, descending from London and San Diego and other company offices. The memories shared that day revealed the depth of her connections, of what her closest friend from law school, Vicky Wei, calls her genuine soul.
“It was really beautiful at her service how everybody sort of talked about her like they thought they were her best friend,” says her stepfather, Dave von Beck. “She treated everyone like that.”
For some of them, Hanna remains embedded in their hearts and minds. Elizabeth Skey, a partner at Cooley, frequently feels the urge to consult with her deft colleague on cases. Gavin Keene, another of her close law school friends, can hear her voice mocking him when he orders boring dishes at restaurants.
Other victims garnered support from the larger community. In Washington and Minnesota, GoFundMe campaigns raised extraordinary sums to help the young families of pilot Jason Winters and Luke and Rebecca Ludwig. In San Diego, an outpouring of grief and respect for Joanne Mera came in from bigwigs and local band members alike. San Diego State University set up a scholarship in her honor. And in and around Woodinville, Mark McNeilly and other vintners rallied to sell the last cases of Ross Mickel’s wine as a benefit to his surviving daughter, Lyla. Soon, McNeilly will produce one more Ross Andrew wine, using the merlot grapes that Mickel and Lyla planted years earlier.
“He was looking forward to so much,” says Bob Betz, Mickel’s mentor. “We got robbed.”
That is a shared sentiment among the friends and family members of the victims, some of whom became acquainted through the tragedy and its related lawsuits. Though their loved ones’ paths to the plane had differed, they are united in grief.
“Even though it’s hard being on the calls with all the families,” says Rick Williams, “if you’re able to pull yourself up for a minute and look at the lives that came together on that plane, and now the families that have come together and been touched on that plane, it’s fascinating.”
A tribute completed about a year after the accident brought them together again. The family of Mickel’s wife, Lauren Hilty, arranged for the construction of two benches engraved with the names of all the victims on the beach at Mutiny Bay. Since Hilty and her son, Remy Mickel, were never found, the family wanted a physical space to memorialize them.
“We don’t have a cemetery. We don’t have an urn,” says Megan Hilty, one of Lauren’s sisters. “That’s our place. That’s where we go to connect with them.”
Von Beck appreciated the gesture, but he doesn’t know if his family will ever visit the site. Last year, they moved from Seattle to California to reset. “We couldn’t stand the floatplanes flying by every day,” says Hanna’s mother, Marcie von Beck.
On a recent overcast morning, more of those planes buzzed by Whidbey Island, dipping in and out of the clouds between the shards of land west of Seattle. Studies show that seaplanes are involved in accidents far more frequently than larger planes, but only a few are fatal. For many residents and visitors, the planes remain a worthwhile risk.
But for some observers, these icons of the Pacific Northwest became sobering reminders of a universal truth, one especially true in the West: how, in an instant, even the most soaring trajectories can be reversed.•
This concludes “The Ripples of Mutiny Bay.” To read all entries, go to altaonline.com/serials.
Benjamin Cassidy is a journalist and fiction writer. Formerly the features editor of Seattle Met, he has written for GQ, National Geographic, and Scientific American, among other publications, and has received awards from the National City and Regional Magazine Association and Society of Professional Journalists. After spending several years in the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in New England.
