Body Snatched From Crash Wreckage

An Arizona doctor faces charges for allegedly loading the body of his non-certificated son in a pickup truck and taking it home after his son crashed at Casa Grande Municipal Airport last Saturday. Dr. Mark Lundell, who with another son witnessed the plane go down, is accused of removing the body of Jacob Lundell, 21, from the wreckage of the family’s 1961 Nord (a French trainer). According to the NTSB’s preliminary report, the plane crashed short of the runway while doing touch and goes. When rescue personnel and investigators arrived, they found the blood-soaked wreckage and some brain matter but no body. Officials traced Lundell’s Paradise Valley address from the plane’s N-number and sent local police to the house. The police arrived just as the pickup pulled into the driveway with the body. In a television interview, the dead pilot’s mother, Deborah Lundell, said that “morally” her husband had done the right thing. “He knew my grieving, he knew my heartache; he knew I needed to see him before they took him away,” she told KTVK. Mark Lundell could face federal charges for removing the body from a scene of an accident. The pilot’s medical and student certificate was taken out in 2001 and had not been renewed.