A man who has donated to former President Donald Trump and other Republicans says the four people killed when a private jet crashed into the mountains of Virginia included members of his family.
No survivors were found at the crash site, which resulted Sunday after the United States scrambled F-16 fighter jets in a supersonic chase of a light aircraft with an unresponsive pilot that violated airspace around Washington D.C.
John Rumpel told The Washington Post that his "entire family" — i.e. his daughter, a grandchild and nanny — was on board the Cessna Citation that crashed near Montebello, Virginia, around 3:30 p.m. Sunday.
"To the best of my knowledge," Rumpel told the Post, "we know nothing about the crash. We are talking to the FAA now."
Rumpel has a history of donations to Republican candidates and causes, including Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., according to Open Secrets.
Rumpel and his wife Barbara own Encore Motors of Melbourne, Florida. The jet that crashed was an Encore plane.
Barbara also is a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) Women's Leadership Forum.
The Daily Mail reported that Rumpel's daughter was Adina Azarian, 49. The outlet added that the Rumpels had lost another daughter in a scuba diving accident when she was only 19.
The previous daughter's death prompted the businessman and his wife to buy an 11-story building in Melbourne and turn the property into Victoria Landing, an assisted-living facility named after their late daughter, the New York Post reported.
On Sunday, the U.S. military attempted to contact the pilot to no avail until the Cessna crashed near the George Washington National Forest in Virginia, North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement.
John Rumpel told The New York Times that if the plane had lost cabin pressure, "they all just would have gone to sleep and never woke up."
"I don't think they've found the wreckage yet," Rumpel told the Times. "It descended at 20,000 feet a minute, and nobody could survive a crash from that speed."
Reuters contributed to this story.
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