Couple Among 5 Victims of Crash

A couple from Marina del Rey were among the five people who died Friday when a light plane crashed into an apartment building in the Fairfax district, relatives said Monday.

Tony Vinatieri, 42, and Bonnie Vinatieri, 41, had joined the flight to Sun Valley, Idaho, because the pilot, Jeffrey T. Siegel, was a contractor who wanted to show them houses he had built there, John Vinatieri of Napa said.

Tony Vinatieri was an entrepreneur who had started with a few vending machines and created a major service business, John, his cousin, said.

“He worked hard, and he had a lot of business savvy,” said another cousin, Holly Flows of Valley Center, in San Diego County. “She helped him a lot. She was sweet as all get-out.”

The others who died in the crash have been identified by friends, relatives and law enforcement officials as Siegel, 50; his niece, 24-year-old screenwriter Jessica Kaplan; and Tibor Reis, 76, a watch repairer.

Reis was a resident of the apartment building; the others were aboard the plane.

The victims have not been officially identified, but “tentative notifications” have been made to their relatives, Craig Harvey, chief of operations at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, said Monday.

The bodies were burned beyond recognition, and positive identifications relying on dental records, postmortem X-rays and other forensic techniques will probably take time, Harvey said. Autopsies are scheduled to begin today.

Two residents of the building were severely injured. A man whose name has not been released was reported in stable condition Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and Casey Cunningham, 25, was in stable condition at the Grossman Burn Center.

The Bonanza Beechcraft 36 took off from Santa Monica Airport about 3:45 p.m. for the flight to Idaho.

Fifteen minutes later, the single-engine plane spiraled nose-down into the three-story apartment complex on Spaulding Avenue, knifing to the first-floor parking garage and starting a fire that destroyed almost a third of the building.

The cause of the crash has not been determined.

John Vinatieri said his cousin was thinking of hiring Siegel to build a home in the Los Angeles area and accepted his invitation to look at some examples of his work in Idaho.

Flows said the Vinatieris, who had no children, were from South Dakota, but had adapted quickly to Southern California.

“They loved the people, they loved the lifestyle,” Flows said. “They loved L.A.”