Wounded Passenger Fought to Keep Dying Friend From Floating Away After Shelter Cove Plane Crash

On August 17, about 3:20 p.m., a small Cessna 140 lifted off from Shelter Cove, only to vanish into the fog and crash moments later into the cold Pacific. The pilot, 48-year-old Brian Kenneth Mariette of Santa Rosa, died while struggling in the water and left his passenger, Matthew Davidson, fighting alone in the fog, bleeding, shivering, and working desperately to keep his friend above the surf for nearly an hour.

Davidson, known in Hawaii as the “Dolphin Man” for swimming long distances between islands, told Redheaded Blackbelt that the flight had begun joyfully. Mariette wanted to show him one of his favorite places. After a safe landing at Shelter Cove, the two ate lunch by the water and walked the beach. But when fog began to roll back in, they prepared to depart.

Takeoff seemed smooth, Davidson said. “There was fog hovering at the end of the runway. Looked like we had plenty of space.”  According to Davidson, Mariette planned to “take off South, which is the safe direction time due to wind, then turn around and go north along the runway and fly over and do a fly by of the airstrip and Shelter Cove” which Davidson wanted to film.

[See video taken on their flight to Shelter Cove here.]

Davidson described the takeoff saying that the older plane didn’t have “a lot of horsepower, so it doesn’t climb very well.” He explained that the plane lifted off and “we went up to around 200 or 300 feet.” He remembers seeing “two people, kind of that were near at the end of the runway, that were watching us as we flew over off the takeoff” and he waved to them before the plane entered the fog.

“It was very thick, a lot thicker than it was,” Davidson said. “It had obviously rolled in. What I found out about that place [Shelter Cove] is it goes in and out of that place like waves on the sea.”

The plane slipped into thick blanket of fog rolling into the cove and Mariette may have misjudged their height. “I just remember, you know, couldn’t see a thing, Davidson said. “One second we were flying, the next I was underwater, like getting pounded by a 50-foot wave.”

How Davidson and Mariette ended up out of the plane isn’t clear to him. But Davidson speculates that a powerful wind shear forced the Cessna down flat against the water. “The landing gear hit first, then the wingtips, then the propeller dug in and the plane stopped suddenly,” he explained. The sudden stop, he believes, created a violent slingshot motion that tore their harness anchors loose and hurled both men forward. “We must have been ripped free and thrown through the thin plexiglass windshield,” he said.

Davidson said it took him days to piece together how he ended up outside the wrecked plane. “At first I was just telling everybody in the hospital, angels…took me out of the plane,” he admitted. “I don’t know how I was taken out from a four-point harness that I did not undo, twenty feet away from the plane, with this huge wound in my chest.”

Davidson thinks he struck the propeller as he was launched out of the plane. “That’s what hit my chest and dug in,” he said.

He ended up deep under the surface and had to swim upwards into rough seas.

Davidson surfaced in shock. The deep wound in his chest was bleeding and he was gasping for air. “The pain was excruciating,” he remembers. “I’m looking down, seeing blood coming out of my chest and the water turning red, and, of course, [I do a] body scan and check my chest, and felt a hole….There just a hole…And also a lot of movement…And obviously I’m like, this isn’t good, but I’m still able to breathe.” He reached down and used his hand to put pressure on his wound.

Looking around he spotted his friend, Brian Mariette, who was struggling to stay afloat. “[H]e was by the plane, on the passenger side of the plane. And as I looked over to him and saw him there, the plane… sank very quickly…It was really eerie.”

Davidson told us, “Brian was struggling and clearly in shock and discombobulated…and wide eyed and struggling to stay [afloat].”

“I’m a lifeguard…I’m at home in the water,” Davidson said. “I immediately went over to assist him and try to engage conversation, assess him and talk him to be calm and how to survive this, how to swim, how to float… .”.

The two men were trapped in a dangerous stretch of the Lost Coast. Fog hung thick, blotting out some of the shoreline, but the part that could be seen was a rugged cliff with rock outcroppings nearby. Davidson said that he tried to guide his friend, urging him to hold his breath when waves broke over their heads. But Mariette grew weaker, spitting up water and gagging on waves as they went over.

Everywhere Davidson looked, jagged black rocks jutted up from the sea. Waves exploded over them, white water foaming, leaving no safe place to swim to land. Beyond the rocks loomed the huge cliff.

“It became very clear there was no way in,” Davidson said. “[T]o get caught in one of these waves would have been instant death for him.” And Davidson worried that he could be smashed between waves and rocks.

So kicking his legs and pressing his one hand to his chest wound to slow the bleeding, and cradling Mariette with the other, Davidson swam desperately. Surrounded by battering waves, he didn’t even know if someone knew about the crash and if help might be on the way.

Minutes crawled by. The water was bitter cold. Davidson struggled with the pain and the cold but refused to let go of his friend. “Then,” Davidson said, “he became unresponsive and lifeless…When I got tired and was having a difficult time, like holding him up, I just held his head up above water with one hand and was trying to kind of shake him and yell at him…[I] held him up for way longer than I think he was with me, thinking rescue might come. We might be able to [resuscitate him].”

With Mariette dead, Davidson said, “I made this solid decision that I’m not going to ditch his body, going to keep him with me…Just held on to him, you know, and it gave me comfort. Even though he…he was lifeless, there’s still some comfort, I think, in just him being there, me not being alone.”

Davidson stopped then added, “I just could not let his body go and get trashed by the waves or eaten by sharks… .”

Then, according to his estimation about 10-15 minutes after the crash and a few minutes after Mariette died, he heard sirens echoing down from the cliffs above. Davidson knew someone had heard the crash. He held on.

The minutes stretched into nearly an hour from the time of the crash. Waves pushed them toward the rocks, and Davidson kicked out again and again, forcing them back into deeper water. His strength was fading. He thought of his father, who had recently passed, and felt his presence with him.

Finally, rescuers appeared out of the fog from the launch area. Shelter Cove Volunteer Fire’s Ocean Rescue Team arrived on a jet ski with a rescue sled and later that was followed by an amphibious boat. With help from CAL FIRE, the U.S. Coast Guard, REACH Air Ambulance, Shelter Cove Fire, Whale Gulch Fire, and City Ambulance, both men were brought aboard. Davidson said, “I had severe hypothermia and seizure-like convulsions from the non-controllable shivering when they finally got me into the air ambulance helicopter to the trauma center in Redding.”

He was flown by helicopter to a trauma center, where he was treated for hypothermia, blood loss, and the large chest wound that dumped so much blood into the water.

Mariette was pronounced dead at the scene. Later it was determined that he drowned.

Looking back, Davidson said his friend’s last moments were hard but, “He died in his favorite place in the world, doing what he loved most. God bless his soul.”

The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash and ask anyone who may have witnessed it to contact investigators at [email protected]

Earlier:

• [UPDATE 5:58 p.m.: All Recovered, One Dead] Plane Crashes at Shelter Cove, Two Rescued From Water
• HCSO Provides Details on Fatal Plane Crash in Shelter Cove Yesterday
• Santa Rosa Man Identified as Victim in Shelter Cove Plane Crash