Accident Victims

He was a former lawman who called himself "Mask" and advocated a hold-nothing-back lifestyle that helped transform mixed martial arts fighting into a craze and turned his own fighting apparel company into a multimillion-dollar business.

Two people were killed when their single-engine aerobatic plane crashed shortly after takeoff Wednesday from Santa Monica Airport and burst into flames. The red, two-seat Marchetti SF-260 airplane, registered to Malibu-based Wingspan Inc., crashed about 5 p.m. at the west end of the runway, police and airport officials said. The identities of the two victims were being withheld until family members could be notified. Witnesses said the plane was immediately in trouble.

Descending through a snowy mist toward Buffalo Niagara International Airport, the crew of a Continental commuter flight noticed a significant ice buildup on the windshield and wings of the plane, despite having turned on the craft's de-icer.

A runaway truck carrying hazardous materials crashed into 11 other vehicles on Interstate 5 north of Tejon Pass on Wednesday, injuring 11 people and closing all northbound lanes for almost three hours, the California Highway Patrol said. The accident happened in thick fog shortly before 1 p.m. on the long grade that descends from the mountains into the southern San Joaquin Valley.

If tragedy brings people together, the still-unexplained crash of a Continental Airlines commuter jet Thursday night forever links Beverly Eckert and Alison Des Forges, two extraordinary women who led separate crusades, against seemingly impossible odds. Eckert was a Sept. 11 widow who turned her grief into powerful advocacy.

Brazilian military officials announced Saturday that they had found two bodies and some debris from the Paris-bound Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean with 228 passengers and crew aboard. Two male bodies, a leather briefcase containing an Air France boarding pass, a numbered blue seat and a nylon backpack were fished out of the ocean about 400 miles northeast of the Fernando de Noronha archipelago off Brazil's northern coast, Col.

Doctors say they've never seen anything like it: A window washer who fell 47 stories from the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper is now awake, talking to his family and expected to walk again. Alcides Moreno, 37, plummeted almost 500 feet in a Dec. 7 scaffolding collapse that killed his brother. Somehow Moreno lived, and doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center announced Thursday that his recovery has been astonishing. He has movement in all his limbs.

Two men were killed early Saturday after one of them drove the wrong way on the 57 Freeway in Diamond Bar, colliding with the other driver in a minivan, California Highway Patrol officers reported. The fiery predawn collision occurred north of the 60 Freeway, officers said in a report. The three-car accident occurred about 4:15 a.m. when Jesse Fierro, 27, of Montebello drove his Ford F-150 truck south in the northbound lanes of the 57.

On a cloudless Saturday evening 50 years ago this week, a Navy bomber carrying eight reservists thundered on a routine training flight out of Los Alamitos Naval Air Station. A minute later, less than 10 miles away, a four-engine Air Force transport plane took off from Long Beach Municipal Airport on its way to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. It carried 35 passengers from various military branches and a crew of six.

A plane crashed Thursday en route to a remote gold mining region in southern Suriname, killing 19 people, officials in the South American country said. The twin-engine Antonov AN-28, operated by Surinamese carrier Blue Wing Airlines, crashed in the jungle on approach to an airstrip in Benzdorp, near the border with French Guiana, officials said.