A Steamboat Springs Internet entrepreneur and her 10-year-old son died Friday afternoon when the corporate jet they were riding in crashed in West Gardiner, Maine.
Jeanette Symons, 45, founder and chief executive officer of Industrious Kid was piloting her Cessna Citation corporate jet when it crashed shortly after it took off from the Augusta Airport in Maine.
Today, investigators with the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board scoured the crash site in a heavily wooded area about five miles away from the Augusta Airport.
Officials on the scene declined to identify the two people killed in the crash, but Tim Donovan, co-founder and vice president of marketing for Industrious Kid told KUSA Channel 9 and the Associated Press that Symons and her son had perished in the crash.
“She definitely walked to the beat of her own drum” Donovan said. “She was really fearless in both her personal and professional pursuits.”
According to the San Francisco Chronicle website, Symons had moved from San Francisco to Steamboat Springs a year and a half ago in order to give her two children a happier childhood, including skiing and bicyling. Since moving to Steamboat, she regularly commuted to the Bay area by plane.
In 2005, Symons launched Industrial Kid and , a social network website for children between the ages of 8-14 so she could provide a safe cyberspace for them free of child predators.
Earlier, she co-founded Ascend Communications, Inc., which was sold to Lucent Technologies in 1999 for $20 billion. She then cofounded Zhone Technologies in Oakland.Witnesses living near the crash site reported they saw a fireball and one said he saw the plane shear off sections of large trees before the plane crashed and became wedged among trees.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Annette Espinoza: 303-954-1655 or aespinoza@denverpost.com
