What a loss :(

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Senator, family killed in Minnesota plane crash
Friday, October 25, 2002 Posted: 2:02 PM EDT (1802 GMT)

EVELETH, Minnesota (CNN) -- Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone, his wife and a daughter died Friday in a small plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota, Democratic sources said.

The sources said three staff members and two crew members also died in the crash.

The plane went down in a wooded area about seven miles east of Eveleth-Virginia Municipal Airport. Officials said bad weather was reported in the area, and the last contact with the plane was at 10:20 a.m. when the plane was about two miles from the Eveleth airport.

Wellstone held a key Democratic seat in the U.S. Senate and had been criss-crossing the state in a tough re-election campaign against former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman.

The plane, a twin-engine turboprop King Air manufactured by Raytheon Aircraft, took off from Flying Cloud Airport in Eden Prairie, a southwestern suburb of Minneapolis. He was scheduled to attend a funeral in the northeast, followed by a campaign stop in Duluth.

Wellstone, 58, won his Senate seat in 1990, the only challenger that year to unseat an incumbent.

The son of Russian immigrants, Wellstone was raised in Arlington, Virginia, and was a champion wrestler at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he earned both a bachelor's degree and a doctorate.

Wellstone was a champion of health care coverage expansion and environmental concerns, and was considered by many to be one of the Senate's most liberal members.

<font color="#00ccff">I saw that. I hated his politics, but I am very sad that he, his wife and his children all died :( </font>

Yeah, I am not going to pretend that I was an admirer of his politics, but any time a plane goes down with all those poor folks, they have my sympathies.

This is sad. I didn't like his politics either, but he was one of the few dems who would actually come out and tell you what he wanted to do in Washington. He wasn't the kind of guy who would say one thing to get elected and then do the opposite when he got to D.C. And I respected that.

The nation lost a good man, I was no fan of his politics, He was a man of conviction I admire that.