A family left town for a youth baseball tournament. Then tragedy struck

By Thomas Lake, CNN

Milton, Georgia (CNN) — A few days after the plane crash, Ansley Van Epps visited the house where her brother and his family once lived. There was food in the refrigerator, dishes in the sink. She walked through her nephews’ rooms and looked at their medals, their sports jerseys, their school uniforms. Elsewhere she found items laid out for a beach vacation the family would never take.

“It was heartbreaking,” she said.

Her brother, Ryan Van Epps, had gone to upstate New York for a youth baseball tournament with his wife, Laura, and their two sons, Harrison, 10; and James Ryan, 12. They were returning June 30 in a small plane piloted by the boys’ grandfather, Roger Beggs.

The plane crashed in the Catskill Mountains, not long after takeoff, for unknown reasons that may have been related to bad weather. All five people were killed. The Van Epps family left behind two dogs, a stunned and grieving community, and an untold number of priceless memories.

Regan Burr was a friend of the family. She remembered Laura’s flower arrangements. They often featured blue hydrangeas and magnolia leaves. Laura brought flowers in a vase to Burr’s house for a cookout on Memorial Day weekend. Burr washed the vase and stored it away. When she heard about the plane crash, she found the vase, cut some hydrangeas from her own yard, put them in the vase, and brought it back to Laura’s house.

No one was home to receive them, so she left the vase on the front porch.

“A whole family was taken away in an instant,” she said.

The Van Epps family was well-known and beloved in Atlanta’s northern suburbs

On Monday, Ryan’s sister Ansley was at Perimeter Mall with her husband and daughters. They were buying clothes for the funeral, scheduled for Friday afternoon at Roswell United Methodist Church, the same church that hosted Ryan and Laura’s wedding 15 years and one day earlier.

At the mall on Monday, Ansley sat down at a table under a skylight and thought about her brother, her nephews, and the challenge of planning a service for five people all at once.

Ryan was the oldest of four Van Epps siblings. Ansley reminisced about the giant forts he built in the backyard. He and his father would collect discarded lumber from construction sites. One treehouse was multiple stories high and had a crow’s nest like you’d see on a pirate ship.

Ryan played baseball, football and lacrosse. He graduated from Roswell High School a year ahead of Laura, who also played lacrosse. Ryan got a college degree in business administration; Laura in special education. They started dating after college, got married and had two sons who attended King’s Ridge Christian School in Alpharetta.

“Harrison cared about doing well in school and had a great attitude about working hard to improve his skills,” wrote Stefanie Gammage, head of the lower school. “He was well-liked by classmates and was a good friend.”

Harrison played quarterback and linebacker in the North Atlanta Football Club. “He was incredibly smart, incredibly driven,” said his coach, Rich Dennis. “He was loved by every kid on the team.”

James Ryan, his older brother, also played football. His team in the Milton High feeder program won a state championship, said his coach, Brent Bechard. James Ryan played tight end, receiver and middle linebacker, or “mic linebacker,” where he led the defense. The coach recalled a goal-line stand at the end of a playoff game. James Ryan and his teammates stopped the running back at the 1-yard line to preserve the victory.

The coach also remembered how James Ryan’s mother, Laura, went out of her way to celebrate the other boys on the team.

“She always had a hug for everybody,” he said.

A trip to Cooperstown, and a memorable home run

James Ryan also played on an elite travel-ball team called the Ninth Inning Blue Jays. They’d been together since the previous August and had looked forward to the tournament in Cooperstown, home to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Each family was responsible for its own travel arrangements. The head coach, Chase Timms, rented an SUV, packed it with baseball equipment, and drove up to New York.

The Van Epps family took a different route.

Laura’s father, Roger Beggs, was a licensed pilot with a six-seat, single-engine Piper Malibu Mirage. Ansley remembered flying with him when Roger delivered her to Savannah for her bachelorette party. She said he was a meticulous pilot who took every precaution, and the plane had recently undergone its annual maintenance.

James Ryan joined the other Blue Jays on one of the many fields at Cooperstown Dreams Park. Their first game was Wednesday night, June 26. The bases were loaded when James Ryan walked to the plate through heavy rain.

Coach Timms watched from his place near third base. He could see the batter’s box turning to mud. The pitcher aimed and fired. James Ryan swung. The ball sailed into the night, over the outfield, over the fence.

James Ryan ran the bases carefully after his grand slam. He didn’t want to fall in the mud. The coach saw him rounding third with a big smile on his face.

That was the first of many home runs for the Blue Jays in Cooperstown. They went 3-2 in pool play before heading into the single-elimination bracket, where they won two more games. On Sunday morning, James Ryan was the starting pitcher against Team Elite National, another Georgia squad, the top-seeded team in the tournament.

“For the majority of the game, we were winning,” Timms said. The Blue Jays scored several runs in the first inning, and James Ryan was pitching well. But Team Elite came back, took the lead, and won the game. The Blue Jays were eliminated.

James Ryan put on a brave face.

“He always took a loss with as much grace as you could want from a 12-year-old,” Timms said.

The coach gathered the players and congratulated them on a wonderful season. The families pressed in together for a picture. Then they prepared to go their separate ways. Coach Timms gave James Ryan one last fist-bump.

“I told him I was proud of him,” Timms said. “I told Laura, ‘We’ll see you guys soon. Safe travels.’”

‘Storm activity along the flight path’

Oneonta Municipal Airport is about 15 miles from the baseball park. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the Piper carrying Roger Beggs and his four passengers took off from Oneonta at 1:40 p.m. They were headed for Charleston, West Virginia, about 560 miles southwest, to refuel before heading on to suburban Atlanta.

It’s not clear what the pilot knew or believed about the weather when he first ascended. Investigators are still working on their preliminary report, which is expected later this month. According to an NTSB statement, “Flight tracking data was lost about 12 minutes after departure.” It also said, “Meteorological data shows storm activity along the flight path.”

The single-engine Piper did not get very far. It crashed in unknown circumstances along the wooded hills near Lake Cecil Road in the town of Masonville, New York, about 30 miles from the Oneonta airport. The NTSB said the plane left a trail of debris almost a mile long.

“There’s a lot of questions about what happened,” Ansley Van Epps said, beneath the skylight at Perimeter Mall, in a conversation with a reporter on Monday. It had been more than a week since the crash, and she did not expect to understand it anytime soon.

“We will be asking why for the rest of our lives,” she said.

Meanwhile, she and others who loved the Van Epps family took care of other priorities. The dogs, a young black lab named Gunner and an old golden retriever named Walker, were in the care of Laura’s stepmother. Friends were helping each other choose colorful outfits for the funeral, because they were sure Laura wouldn’t have wanted anyone to wear black. James Ryan’s football teammates were adding their signatures to his helmet. Someone was organizing an unusually long list of pallbearers.

There was something else, too. A terrible errand to run.

On Tuesday morning, Ansley, her husband, D.J., her parents, and her younger brother, Jason, flew to JFK airport in New York. A man who worked for Delta Air Lines drove them onto the tarmac to see the remains of their loved ones loaded into the cargo hold of a plane. The driver was nearly overcome with emotion. Ansley started crying. The survivors boarded the plane to escort their loved ones back to Atlanta.

On that flight, Ansley reached a state of emotional exhaustion. She was thinking about Walker, the family’s old golden retriever, who’d been with Ryan and Laura since before they were married. Now Walker was about 15 years old, blind and deaf, living his last days.

Ansley was crying and laughing, loudly enough that she worried other people might think she was crazy. She thought about her nephews, and their old dog, and she said something like, “James Ryan and Harrison will be so happy to see Walker soon.”

The plane continued southwest, descending steadily, bringing the Van Epps family closer and closer to their final destination.

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