GCI has confirmed that the wife of company chief executive Ron Duncan -- Dr. Janice-Dani Bowman -- was one of three good Samaritans to reach Monday's fatal plane crash nearly 12 hours before other help arrived on the scene.
Duncan and Bowman were at GCI's corporate lodge at Lake Aleknagik when word first spread of the crash. Bowman and two other good Samaritans were helicoptered to the site.
"As soon as Dani knew there were survivors, she wanted to get to the scene to provide medical attention," Duncan said of his wife's actions in a statement. Bowman has chosen to decline media interviews, according to the statement.
The victims and survivors of the crash weren't anonymous people Bowman was treating; she knew them well. Among the dead was Dana Tindall, a GCI executive, and her teenage daughter Corey, pilot Terry Smith, a neighbor and friend of Bowman's, as well as Sen. Ted Stevens, whom Bowman held in high regard.
A pediatric specialist at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, Bowman testified as a character witness for Stevens during his 2008 criminal trial. On the witness stand, seemingly nervous and overcome with emotion, Bowman told jurors of how Stevens once helped save the life of a critically ill infant. The baby needed immediate evacuation for a higher level of care. Stevens pulled strings to coordinate an emergency Air Force flight, Bowman testified at his trial.
On Monday night, Bowman and two other volunteers were dropped above the crash scene by helicopter, then scrambled down the steep, slick mountainside to reach the plane. Sr. Master Sgt. Jonathon Davis, an Alaska Air National Guard parajumper who made it to the crash site the next morning, credited Bowman and the other good Samaritans for making the extraction of the victims much easier.
As they spent the night in the plane with the dead and the living, there wasn't much medical care the volunteer team could provide, Davis said in a Wednesday phone interview. Bowman and her helpers had brought medical equipment with them, but left it high on the hillside and it soon grew too dark, wet and foggy to head back to retrieve it. The equipment may also have been of little help. According to Davis, the care the survivors required was not extraordinary in the sense of helping people breathe or keeping their hearts beating.
It was, however, an extraordinary effort amid treacherous conditions to keep warm and calm the two adults and two teenagers who had survived the impact. Bowman had no medication to relieve the pain of their broken bones and battered bodies.
How do you ease the hurt and shock of watching friends and family die? A 13-year-old survivor's father had died. A 16-year-old and her mother had also died, as had the pilot and Stevens. And the rescuers and the survivors alike spent the evening inside the wreckage close to the bodies.
Contact Jill Burke at jill(at)alaskadispatch.com.