Victims of Crash Believed to Be Missing Thousand Oaks Family

A hunter in the San Bernardino County desert has found the wreckage of a light plane and the apparent remains of three Thousand Oaks residents missing since their plane disappeared in July on a trip from Utah to Camarillo.

The San Bernardino County coroner’s office tentatively identified the bodies as those of K. Reed Harrison, 54; his wife, Judith Utz Harrison, 54, and their 18-year-old daughter, Julie.

With the discovery, a memorial service was scheduled for next week in Westlake Village by daughters Kathleen Harrison, 24, and Christina Harrison, 25.

Christina Harrison said she learned Sunday night of the discovery from a friend of her mother’s who knew the man who found the wreckage.

“We’re doing OK,” she said Monday in a telephone interview from her home in Salt Lake City. “We’d been expecting it, but . . . I thought knowing would be better. It’s not much better.”

The Harrisons were reported missing July 25, sending the daughters on a weeks-long interstate search that covered parts of Nevada, Utah and eastern California.

Reed Harrison, an attorney and former Thousand Oaks planning commissioner, had been flying his wife and youngest daughter back to Camarillo Airport in his white-and-beige single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza after a family reunion in Roosevelt, Utah.

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The plane was last spotted on radar screens after passing over mountains near Price, Utah, about 60 miles southwest of Roosevelt.

It apparently slammed nose first into the desert floor and disintegrated about 26 miles northeast of Baker, only two miles off its prescribed course toward Camarillo, said Marshall Franey, a San Bernardino County coroner’s inspector.

Robert Buhrle found the wreckage Saturday while hunting in an area surrounded by mines, and brought San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies to the site Sunday, the Sheriff’s Department said.

Franey said the crash scattered wreckage in a 450-foot-wide circle across the Silurian Hills.

The plane came down just five miles from a dry lake bed that could have been used as an emergency runway and would have been visible from the air over the crash site, Franey said.

“(The wreckage) was found approximately two miles off its course,” Franey said. “It would have been very difficult to see from the air. From the air, it would appear to be just debris from a mine shaft--there’s two or three mine shafts in the area just a short distance away.”

Franey said purses and wallets found at the crash site identified the victims as the Harrisons, but he is awaiting the family’s dental records to confirm the identification.

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When the plane disappeared in July, Christina and Kathleen Harrison launched a search for their parents and sister that engaged dozens of pilots covering thousands of square miles of desert.

The Civil Air Patrol, an auxiliary of the Air Force, had volunteers fly over the entire 65,000-square mile flight path through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California searching for sign of the Beechcraft. The air search continued for 18 days before it was called off.

The two daughters also handed out flyers in Nevada, posted a $25,000 reward and were flooded with calls from psychics. The reward offer expired in November, Christina Harrison said Monday.

“We were contacted by probably 15 psychics, and they weren’t the only people who tried to take us,” she said. “There were a lot of people who probably took a little bit of advantage.”

One Las Vegas man called the Harrisons’ attorney, saying the family was alive and living in Mexico, and demanded that the reward be put into an escrow fund for him until he provided proof.

“It’s just a huge loss--most of our family, the baby and our parents. Julie was the youngest,” Christina Harrison said. “Finding them has forced us to deal with it where we hadn’t dealt with it before. We were just kind of plugging along before and doing what we could do to find them.”

The National Transportation Safety Board is studying the wreckage to try to determine the cause of the crash, said Fred O’Donnell, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

“We’re assisting to determine whether there were any violations of FAA regulations, and we’ll report to the board with that information,” he said.