Coosaw was a ‘safe place’ for SC’s Sanford family. Then, a fighter jet crashed into it
Before the chaos of Thursday afternoon, when a fighter jet seemingly fell out of the sky and crashed onto their family farm, Coosaw Plantation had been a quiet family retreat for former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, his siblings and the entire Sanford family.
It was here where the family vacationed each summer.
It was here where Sanford retreated into himself in 2009 after his infamous period of disgrace, having been caught having an affair that spelled the end his marriage and threw his meteoric political rise off-course.
It was here, at Coosaw, where Sanford would bury his father and, later, his mother. His dad had but one final request: “Bury me someday under an old oak tree at Coosaw.”
On Friday morning, with parts of the Beaufort County property still taped off for investigators, a reflective Sanford said some of those centuries-old oak trees that his father loved so much were now gone.
The aircraft, which the U.S. Marine Corps identified as an F/A-18D Hornet military jet, had landed about 150 yards away from his father’s grave.
The pilots survived the crash. The trees, rooted deep in the heart of the Sanford family, did not.
“It has really great emotional significance to me and my siblings,” Sanford said of the family land in an interview Friday morning.
“For a place that’s normally quiet and something of a family retreat, it was anything but that yesterday. It was a cacophony of sirens and firetrucks and EMS and military vehicles and more. Seemingly every red or blue light in Beaufort County descended upon Coosaw.”
Chaos had consumed Coosaw.
Though Sanford was not on the property at the time, his sister, Sarah Sanford Rauch, was at Coosaw when the jet crashed on the family farm.
“It’s almost like a slow motion of the worst thing you can dream of,” Rauch said of the crash. “There was this massive explosion and then the worst sound afterwards, the complete and utter silence.”
Then, she saw the black plume of smoke rising in the distance.
Rauch turned to her brother Bill Sanford, who was also on the property at the time of the crash.
“There was no question what had happened, and I did not see the pilot eject, so I was frantic to get out there as quickly as possible,” she said.
Rauch had grown up hearing that familiar roar of jet engines. Her mother, Peggy, had always told her and her three brothers, “That’s the sound of freedom.”
But this time, something didn’t sound right.
Rauch said the jet was “making a little bit of a different sound” as she and her brother Bill Sanford, watched it rise into the sky and out over the water.
“Look at that after burn,” she remembered her brother saying, as they agreed that one of the flames on that jet “just didn’t look right.”
Moments later, the sleek aircraft suddenly began falling. Rauch walked out further into the yard, watching the plane fly almost parallel to the Coosaw River, all the while dipping ever lower.
“I think it’s going down,” she said to herself.
When she heard the explosion and saw the smoke, her heart dropped.
The cause of the crash is still under investigation.
“You take them totally for granted,” she said of the aircraft that frequently fly over the property. “And you sometimes forget about the people inside.”
But what she and Bill did not know was that their other brother, John Sanford, who is a private pilot, was doing a prescribed burn of some pine trees on the property at the time.
Rauch called it “miraculous” that all three of them were there on the property at the same time on a weekday afternoon. The Sanford siblings all live in the Lowcountry, but not all of them reside at Coosaw.
John was about 200 yards away from the jet when it went down not far from the Coosaw River, and he got to the pilots first, Rauch said.
When she saw them walking up the path, Rauch said she had a hard time putting her feelings into words.
She imagined what these young pilots, a man and a woman, saw when they ejected from their jet.
“They might have seen fire below them,” she said. “I just can’t imagine. It’s a shocking, awful, horrible experience. Thank God they’re OK.”
Rauch said she wanted to give them a hug. Instead, they got many pats on the back.
“To lose some of our our trees, you know, and to have our safe place shaken, that’s OK,” she said.
Trees can be replanted, she said.
Then, she quoted her father, who always told her, “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”
This story was originally published March 4, 2022 at 2:24 PM.
