By Angie DiMichele
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. — There’s no question everyone in Pines Village on the night of July 13 was lucky.
After a 1976 Cessna T337G hit a tree along the 6800 block of Southwest 14th Street and crashed into the ground in someone’s front yard, the pilot, his wife and their children were walking and talking within minutes of the crash. The four bystanders who quickly rescued them also had no major injuries. And the tree the plane ripped a chunk out of could have been the reason there was no tragedy, some officers at the scene speculated, according to body-worn camera videos recently released by Pembroke Pines Police.
“That house got so lucky,” one officer said as she walked past the mangled plane in a tangle of tree limbs. “Wow.” The officer later said to another: “Wild, right? How lucky did that house get? How lucky is that house? Imagine that would’ve fallen on the house.” She had just a day earlier been talking with another officer about the frequency of plane crashes in the city, she said.
“You know what’s crazy, sarge? I was just telling her yesterday, this happens all the time, and today it happened,” the officer said.
A different officer said that the plane crashing into the tree could have slowed it down.
“They probably would have hit the street or someone’s house,” one officer said.
Carlos Balza Cardenas, 58, of Weston, was flying the six-seat small plane, approaching North Perry Airport about 8 p.m. when it crashed about a mile short of the airport. He and his family were flying back from a trip to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands and stopped for fuel in Puerto Rico, an incident report said.
Before trying to land, Balza Cardenas told police “he had lowered his landing gear and went to add throttle but there was no thrust and the plane lost altitude and crashed,” the incident report said.
Balza Cardenas; his wife, 54-year-old Fancly Maurette; and their 13-year-old and 16-year-old daughters were trapped inside the plane as a fire erupted in the engine compartment.
Using a sledgehammer to smash the plane’s windows, four people on the ground freed the family from the plane. As the wreckage filled with smoke, they sprayed a hose and fire extinguisher. The rescuers were off-duty Boca Raton Police detective Scott Hanley, Eddy Crispin, Tarrance Sheffield and Emanuel Llanguno.
One of the first officers to arrive said over radio that the scene was “a mess,” as one of the four people were still trapped inside, the newly released video shows. The four men could be seen helping Maurette, the last to be rescued, climb through the shattered glass of the plane’s front windshield.
A woman who lived nearby hugged the younger teen and patted her back as she cried.
“Just have her have a seat,” the officer said.
“She wanted a hug,” the woman replied. “I was just gonna let her hold me.”
“Are you related?” the officer asked.
“No, I just live over here,” she said.
The family was taken to Memorial Regional Hospital with minor injuries. Maurette, with a bandage around her head, could be seen in the body-worn camera video consoling her younger daughter, whose legs were shaking as she talked to fire rescue. They placed the pilot in a neck brace, strapped him to a board and loaded him onto a stretcher.
After everyone had been rescued, an officer said over radio that there weren’t any major injuries.
“I don’t know how,” he said to another officer at the scene.
Some who live in the neighborhoods near the airport are fed up with hoping for luck each time there’s a crash. Several in recent years have ended in tragedy instead, including a 2021 crash where a plane dropped from the sky onto a moving SUV with a woman and her son inside, killing 4-year-old Taylor Bishop.
A total of 41 planes have crashed at and around North Perry Airport within the last five years, according to a recent resolution from the city demanding a safety study in the wake of the July crash. The FAA traffic control tower at the airport is “the busiest federal contract facility” in the country, and the airport’s annual number of takeoffs and landings in 2023 and 2024 far outpaced levels not expected until 10 years in the future, the resolution said.
The airport has had 13 accidents involving property damage, injury or death, and another 20 involving mechanical failures between 2020 and 2024, according to the Broward County Aviation Department . The Florida Department of Transportation reviews the safety protocols at North Perry Airport every year, and North Perry has “received a perfect score with zero discrepancies or issues to correct” in 25 years, county department spokeswoman Paris Tyburski said a few days after the July crash.
A town hall on airport safety is scheduled from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the South Regional/Broward College Library in Pembroke Pines.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary investigation report on the recent Pembroke Pines crash is not yet available.
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