Nashville — Authorities reported that all seven passengers aboard a plane including Tarzan actor Joe Lara and his diet guru wife were presumed dead after it crashed in a lake near the US city of Nashville.
According to Rutherford County Fire and Rescue (RCFR) on Facebook, at 11 am local time on Saturday (May 29), the small business jet crashed shortly after taking off from the Smyrna, Tennessee, airport for Palm Beach, Florida. The plane went down into Percy Priest Lake, about 19 km south of Nashville.
CNN reported that the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that seven people were aboard the plane. Captain Joshua Sanders, RCFR incident commander, told a press conference that by Saturday night, operations had switched from search and rescue to recovery efforts, CNA reported, quoting AFP.
“We are no longer in an attempt to (look) for live victims at this point so we’re now recovering as much as we can from the crash site,” he said.
RCFR announced on Facebook on Sunday afternoon that recovery operations had found “several components of the aircraft as well as human remains” in a debris field about half a mile wide.
The actor Lara played Tarzan in the 1989 television movie Tarzan In Manhattan. Following that, he starred in the television series Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, which ran from 1996 to 1997.
In 2018, Lara married Gwen Shamblin Lara, who was the leader of a Christian weight-loss group called Weigh Down Ministries. She founded the group in 1986, and then in 1999 founded the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood, Tennessee.
She is survived by two children from a previous marriage, according to a statement posted on the church’s website.
Born on October 2, 1962, William Joseph Lara was an American actor, martial artist, and musician, best known for the role of Tarzan in the American TV series Tarzan: The Epic Adventures.
He also appeared in many action films, among them Steel Frontier and American Cyborg: Steel Warrior. He gave up acting after 20 years in 2002 to pursue a career in country music. At the peak of his fame, Joe Lara appeared in two action films, Armstrong and Warhead./TISG