ALBUQUERQUE — A two-time Olympic distance runner, his 15-year-old son and his son’s friend were killed in a fiery plane crash in Sedona, Ariz., his wife confirmed Friday.
Pat Porter, a graduate of Evergreen High School and Adams State University, was piloting the Beech B-60 when it crashed and burst into flames on takeoff Thursday morning, killing all aboard, including son Connor and his friend Connor Mantsch, said Porter’s wife, Trish Porter.
An FAA database showed the plane was registered to Pat Porter, but the family and authorities had declined to confirm the victims’ identities before Trish Porter called a news conference. The 14-year-old Mantsch attended Albuquerque Academy with her son.
She said her husband and the boys had been to Sedona for three days before the plane went down.
Just before the crash, Porter said she and her husband had exchanged a series of “humorous text messages.”
“My last text message to him: ‘When are you coming home’?” she said at the news conference, with her daughter, Shannon, 11, beside her.
Trish Porter, also a former Olympian, said she found out about the crash Thursday afternoon as she drove back from ice skating training for Shannon. She said details about the crash remained unclear Friday.
Pat Porter, a former 10,000-meter Olympian and 13-time distance runner national champion, married high jumper Trish King in 1991 after the two met during a pre-Olympic training camp for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, according to Trish Porter’s website.
Trish King competed in the 1988 Games as a high jumper.
The couple moved to Albuquerque in 1994.
“He made me laugh,” the Menlo Park, Calif., native said. “He was just a lot of fun.”
Pat Porter graduated from Adams State in Alamosa in 1982 and was inducted into the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Hall of Fame this month, according to an RMAC spokesman.
Porter was a track star at Evergreen and won eight USA Track & Field senior men’s cross country national championships. He also set a world record in 1983 for the road 10K.
Connor Porter was nationally ranked in fencing. His classmate, Mantsch, was preparing for his freshman year at Albuquerque Academy and was a soccer player, said a family spokeswoman.
