Today’s Burned-Out Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
On the morning of June 9, 1956, a U.S. Navy jet fighter loaded with 1,000 gallons of fuel plowed into a group of houses in South Minneapolis as the pilot tried to make an emergency landing at Wold-Chamberlain Field. The pilot was killed, as were four of the five family members (one child survived) living in a house that took the brunt of the impact. A three-year-old girl in another house was also killed. All told, 15 people were injured, and 11 houses were either destroyed or damaged in the crash, near 58th Street and 46th Avenue South. The crash was, of course, a huge news story, and authorities later estimated that 75,000 people (probably an inflated number) tried to reach the scene, tying up traffic for miles around.
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In this photograph, a fireman straddles the covered body of the three-year-old girl who died, possibly in the burned-out house behind him. The girl’s mother managed to escape the house with another child. Later, the sobbing mother told reporters she’d wanted to go back after the girl, “but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t get in. Everything was in flames.”
The crash was the second air disaster of the week in the Twin Cities. Four days earlier, a U.S. Air Force jet had overshot a runway while landing at Wold-Chamberlain and struck a car on a nearby highway. A mother and daughter in the car were killed in that accident.
Culled from: Strange Days, Dangerous Nights: Photos from the Speed Graphic Era
Follow-Up Du Jour!
Oh, remember that creepy “Hi Walter I Got A New Girlfriend” video that went viral when a mother thought that the abducted girl in the video looked an awful lot like her daughter who went missing around the same time the video was uploaded? As suspected, it’s a fake. Oh well, death goes on… (Thanks for the update, Aimee!)
Disturbing Video Investigated In Case of Missing Teen Was Fake