ISU coach killed in crash after NCAA title game

A private plane carrying Illinois State University's associate head basketball coach and a deputy athletics director back from the NCAA basketball title game in Indianapolis crashed in a central Illinois field on Tuesday, killing seven.

Rescue personnel found no survivors at the site near the city of Bloomington, and a coroner pronounced the seven occupants dead, McLean County Sheriff Jon Sandage said at a news conference.

Illinois State University President Larry Dietz confirmed that associate head basketball coach Torrey Ward, 36, and Aaron Leetch, 37, the athletic department's deputy director for external relations, were killed in the early-morning crash.

The plane went down in a soybean field 2.5 miles (four kilometers) from the Bloomington airport. All the victims died from blunt force trauma resulting from the crash, said Coroner Kathleen Davis.

The Cessna 414 twin-engine aircraft took off from Indianapolis and crashed just short of the Central Illinois Regional Airport in Bloomington after midnight, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The National Transportation Safety Board was investigating, but there was no initial word on the cause of the crash. News photos from near the scene showed dense fog.

Radar contact was lost moments before the crash and a search was launched when the pilot failed to close out his flight plan. It took about three hours to find the wreckage.

The other victims included Scott Bittner, a 42-year-old business owner whose father owned the plane; Terry Stralow, 64, a sports bar owner; pilot Thomas Hileman, 51; and Andrew Butler, 40, an employee of Sprint, authorities said.

Jason Jones, 45, a former basketball and baseball player for Illinois Wesleyan University who worked at Wells Fargo Advisors, also died, said his wife, Lyndsey Jones. Endi