Survivor released from hospital after helicopter crash that killed Utah CEO
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RIRIE — The family of the surviving victim of a deadly helicopter crash into Ririe Reservoir Thursday is sharing their story after he was released from the hospital Sunday.
According to Instagram story posts by Texas-based social media influencer Jennifer Houghton, known by her handle @TurtleCreekLane, her husband Steve Houghton was the injured passenger. Their family friend, 59-year-old Bradford Brown of Alpine, Utah, was the pilot who died in the crash.
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Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Coleen Niemann tells EastIdahoNews.com Houghton was recently discharged. According to the family, he is back in Texas recovering.
According to Bonneville County Sheriff spokesman Sgt. Bryan Lovell, the helicopter crash site was cleaned up by Friday evening and reopened to the public.
According to local flight radar data, the helicopter was a Bell 505 Jet Ranger X and took off from Rexburg–Madison County Airport around 4:16 p.m. Thursday. The Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office reported the crash happened around 4:40 p.m. about a mile east of the Ririe Dam.
Deputies have said a downed power line was discovered in the area of the crash, but the FAA and NTSB are still investigating the circumstances.
Jennifer shared on Instagram that around 5:30 on Thursday, her family was at dinner in Dallas when she received a notification from the Garmin app on her phone that there had been a crash.
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“At first, I didn’t think much of it,” says Jennifer on the post. “But then I noticed – it wasn’t coming from Steve’s phone. It was from Brad’s helicopter. My heart dropped.”
Jennifer says she looked at Brown’s helicopter’s GPS signal, and it was sitting still on the Ririe Reservoir.
Jennifer and Steve’s daughter, Tiffany Houghton, who is also a social media influencer, posted that her mom received a call from a phone number with an Idaho area code. When she answered, a local snowmobiler was on the other end.
“This man on the phone said he had been snowmobiling and saw a fatal helicopter crash over the reservoir. My heart stopped; I thought immediately my dad was gone,” says Tiffany’s post. “The bystander had gone down to the reservoir to the crash site. Miraculously, the helicopter had not gone through the ice.”
Tiffany recounted that the snowmobiler told the family he was “very nervous about going out onto the ice” but was able to reach Steve and climb to the top of a nearby hill to call first responders and Jennifer.
“For some reason that I will be grateful for every day for the rest of my life, my dad felt to sit in the back left seat instead of upfront. Presumably to get good pictures and videos of the beautiful landscape to send to my mom,” says Tiffany’s post. “In addition to a seatbelt, he was also wearing his harness, which saved his life.”
The Houghton family flew from Dallas to Idaho Falls and arrived at EIRMC around 2 a.m. Friday, where they learned that Steve miraculously had no life-threatening injuries.
“Steve has five broken ribs and is pretty swollen and beat up on various other areas. The doctors don’t know how this is all that happened,” says Kimmy Houghton, Jennifer and Steve’s daughter-in-law in a post to her Instagram. “There was zero head trauma, the ribs broke in a way with zero punctures to major organs, and there is zero internal bleeding. There are so, so many miracles.”
Houghton was released Sunday, and the family says as Steve recovers, they are grieving the loss of their longtime friend.
“The Brown’s have been some of my parent’s closest friends since college. Please pray with us for the Brown family as they mourn the loss of Brad,” says Tiffany’s post. “He was literally the kind of person who have the shirt off his back (on multiple occasions.).”
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