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Marine died trying to rescue crew in Osprey crash after he “heroically reentered” burning cockpit, probe finds
Alexia and Bart Collart braced for a hard visit. Marines came to their home in Arlington, Virginia, last week to brief them on what caused the Osprey crash in Australia last year that resulted in the death of their son and two other Marines.
But they weren’t expecting to hear these words: Your son didn’t die in the crash.
Cpl. Spencer R. Collart had safely escaped the aircraft. But the 21-year-old saw that the Osprey’s two pilots were unaccounted for. Despite the smoke and flames, he went back in.
Collart “heroically reentered the burning cockpit of the aircraft in an attempt to rescue the trapped pilots,” the official Marine Corps investigation into the crash found. “He perished during this effort.”
For his valor, Collart will be posthumously awarded the service’s highest noncombat award: the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. It is an honor awarded for acts of heroism at great risk to the servicemember’s life.
U.S. Marines Corps via AP
It didn’t surprise his dad that Spencer tried to save the pilots.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Bart Collart told Military.com in a phone interview Saturday. “Of course, our initial reaction was, ‘You silly, silly brave boy, why did you do that?'”
Spencer’s other military awards include the National Defense Service Medal and Global War, Terrorism Service Medal and Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, according to his obituary.
“He was all in”
Spencer Collart was a goal-driven, 6-foot-2, grinning Washington-Liberty High School lacrosse player who walked into the house on his 18th birthday with a surprise: He’d just enlisted.
“The Marines are the top of the top. The best of the best,” Spencer told his mom Alexia Collart, when she asked him why. The Collarts weren’t a military family, but Spencer wanted to serve. And he wanted to fly.
He got his top assignment choice and met his two best friends, Lance Cpl. Evan Strickland and Cpl. Jonah Waser. They spent a year together training to become crew chiefs, enlisted Marines responsible for the aircraft and its passengers. There’s a photo of them posing with their class on April 22, 2022, the day they earned their wings.
They were flying the V-22 Osprey, which functions as both an airplane and a helicopter. But it’s an aircraft that has a troubled history and four fatal accidents in two years.
In June 2022, Strickland was killed along with four other Marines in a training crash in California. Collart served as a pallbearer. He stayed in close touch with Strickland’s family, calling to check on them, Facetiming them on the crash anniversary, and reading the accident investigation report from cover to cover, Strickland’s mother, Michelle, said.
“He wanted to really understand,” she said.
When Spencer’s unit deployed to Australia in April 2023, he asked his mother if he could give Michelle Strickland her number so they could text each other.
“He had the foresight to connect me with Michelle. I don’t know if he was concerned or worried. I suspect maybe he was,” Alexia Collart said.
Rod Lamkey / AP
Still, Spencer flourished in his role. He took on hard jobs no one wanted, like packing the unit’s plane before they deployed. His squadron kept showing up with more gear, so he kept unpacking and repacking it, again and again.
By the fourth try Spencer was “red and black, just covered in grease and sunburn,” his commander told Bart Collart. Spencer earned a first-class ticket to Australia for his effort.
In the Osprey, Spencer spent most of the flight in the “tunnel,” the area right behind the pilot and co-pilot, learning from them, with a goal to become a pilot himself. When Spencer’s personal effects arrived after his death, Bart Collart found his son’s Marine Corps camouflage cap, known as a cover. He put it on and metal nudged his forehead.
Spencer had pinned a 2nd lieutenant’s gold “butter bar” and a set of pilot’s wings into the band.
“He put these in here to remind himself every time he put his cap on of his next goal,” Bart Collart said. “He was all in. He walked the walk, he talked the talk, and he was just, he just loved it so much.”
He “thought the world” of crewmates he tried to save
On August 27, 2023, two Marines came to the Collarts’ door.
Spencer Collart’s Osprey had crashed during an Australian military exercise, killing him and Capt. Eleanor LeBeau and aircraft commander Maj. Tobin Lewis. For months, that’s all his parents knew. Then, last week, the Marines came back, to brief their findings.
/ AP
Seconds after the Osprey hit the ground, the aircraft filled with smoke and flames. Collart had been standing in the tunnel even as the plane was going down. Most of the 23 troops on board escaped out the back, including a commander who told investigators he saw Collart escape out a side door.
A site team later found Collart’s tether – what he’d use to latch onto the Osprey to move around during flight – undamaged outside the aircraft.
But not everyone made it out. The pilots were still inside. The Osprey had crashed nose first, and they were trapped.
Collart went back. Investigators believe he may have unbuckled Lewis from his restraints before he succumbed.
Collart “thought the world” of Lewis and LeBeau, Bart Collart said. According to his obituary, “one of his proudest moments was when Spencer flew in the Osprey V22 with Major Toby Lewis and Captain Ellie LeBeau in front of thousands of spectators at the Gold Coast air show.”
Bart Collart believes Lewis’ last-minute maneuver to level the plane as it was crashing right side down helped the troops in the back survive.
“We’re so proud of Spencer,” Bart Collart told Military.com. “He was just a complete badass going in there and trying to save his friends, and I totally get that — I can’t blame him for that. … I just wish that somehow he could have made it back out and still be here with us.”
The fourth member of the flight crew, Cpl. Travis Reyes, has been at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio for the last year recovering from critical injuries. Saturday marked the first time he got to fly home to his parents’ house in Maryland.
A funeral, and then a wedding
Spencer’s family met Waser for the first time at the funeral. This time it was Waser who put on dress blues to serve as a pallbearer and escort his best friend’s remains from Dover Air Force Base to Arlington National Cemetery.
Spencer’s younger sister, Gwyneth Collart, felt instant chemistry. Her parents saw it too.
“As soon as I met him, I was like, this is not the time or the place to be falling in love,” Gwyneth Collart said of Waser. “Grieving will never be easy, but he made grieving a little bit more comfortable to do. And he just, I mean, he took my breath away.”
Months later, Waser asked her father for Gwyneth’s hand.
“You guys told me that Marines work fast, and you weren’t kidding,” Bart Collart said, laughing.
/ AP
Gwyneth Collart and Waser married July 6 in Arlington and held their reception at Top of the Town, a ballroom that has a terrace overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. They could see the section where Spencer was buried, and Gwyneth pinned her brother’s portrait to her bouquet.
“I think that Spencer knew what I needed and what my family needed after this, and it feels like I got exactly what I needed to get through this,” Gwyneth Collart said.
Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves made his professional auto racing debut on Saturday at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“The Matrix” star, who qualified 31st out of 35 cars, ran as high as 21st before a single-car crash a little more than halfway through the 45-minute race briefly stopped him in his tracks.
Darron Cummings / AP
The 60-year-old spun into the grass without a collision on the exit of Turn 9 when he had about 21 minutes of racing left. He re-entered the course and continued driving, signaling he was uninjured.
Reeves finished 25th.
The actor is competing at Indianapolis in the Toyota GR Cup, a Toyota spec-racing series and a support series for this weekend’s Indy 8 Hour sports car event. He has a second race on Sunday.
Darron Cummings / AP
He is driving the No. 92 BRZRKR car, which is promoting his graphic novel “The Book of Elsewhere.” He is teammates with Cody Jones from “Dude Perfect.”
Reeves has previous racing experience as a former participant in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach in the celebrity race. Reeves won the event in 2009.
A passenger successfully landed a small plane on Friday after the pilot had a medical emergency, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 90 was traveling from Henderson Executive Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada to Monterey Regional Airport in California, with a pilot and one other person on board, the FAA said.
The pilot suffered an unspecified medical emergency while flying, the FAA said, forcing the passenger to take the controls and make an emergency landing at Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California.
The Kern Fire Department told CBS News affiliate KBAX that firefighters were called to a report of a medical emergency on the plane. The pilot was reported to be “incapacitated,” the fire department said. Firefighters saw the plane approach and land safely, then “chased” the plane down the runway in emergency vehicles to meet it.
The FAA did not release the passenger or pilot’s identities nor give an update on the pilot’s condition. The pilot was taken to an area hospital by ambulance. The passenger did not report any injuries.
The FAA and the National Transportation Security Board will investigate the incident, the FAA said.
Congolese authorities began vaccination against mpox on Saturday, nearly two months after the disease outbreak that spread from Congo to several African countries and beyond was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization.
The 265,000 doses donated to Congo by the European Union and the U.S. were rolled out in the eastern city of Goma in North Kivu province, where hospitals and health workers have been overstretched, struggling to contain the new and possibly more infectious strain of mpox.
Congo, with about 30,000 suspected mpox cases and 859 deaths, accounts for more than 80% of all the cases and 99% of all the deaths reported in Africa this year. All of the Central African nation’s 26 provinces have recorded mpox cases. Officials in Congo previously told CBS News that they’ve struggled to diagnose patients and provide basic care in the vast country of 100 million people, where a fragile, under-resourced healthcare system is also burdened by the stigma associated with the virus.
Although most mpox infections and deaths recorded in Congo are in children under age 15, the doses being administered are only meant for adults and will be given to at-risk populations and front-line workers, Health Minister Roger Kamba said this week.
“Strategies have been put in place by the services in order to vaccinate all targeted personnel,” Muboyayi ChikayaI, the minister’s chief of staff, said as he kicked off the vaccination.
Moses Sawasawa / AP
At least 3 million doses of the vaccine approved for use in children are expected from Japan in the coming days, Kamba said.
Mpox, also known as monkeypox, had been spreading mostly undetected for years in Africa before the disease prompted the 2022 global outbreak that saw wealthy countries quickly respond with vaccines from their stockpiles while Africa received only a few doses despite pleas from its governments.
However, unlike the global outbreak in 2022 that was overwhelmingly focused on gay and bisexual men, mpox in Africa is now being spread via sexual transmission as well as through close contact among children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups, Dr. Dimie Ogoina, the chair of WHO’s mpox emergency committee, recently told reporters.
More than 34,000 suspected cases and 866 deaths from the virus have been recorded across 16 countries in Africa this year. That is a 200% increase compared to the same period last year, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
A lack of diagnostic materials and basic medicines to treat the virus, which can improve survival rates, have also hampered efforts to contain the outbreak, and access to vaccines remains a challenge.
Moses Sawasawa / AP
The continent of 1.4 billion people has only secured a commitment for 5.9 million doses of mpox vaccines, expected to be available from October through December, Dr. Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa CDC, told reporters last week. Congo remains a priority, he said.
At the vaccination drive in Goma, Dr Jean Bruno Kibunda, the WHO representative, warned that North Kivu province is at a risk of a major outbreak due to the “promiscuity observed in the camps” for displaced people, as one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis caused by armed violence unfolds there.
The news of the vaccination program brought relief to many in Congo, especially in hospitals that had been struggling to manage the outbreak. Doctors with several charities working in the country have told CBS News they’re overstretched and short on supplies, even having to use tents and mattresses on the floor of makeshift isolation wards to treat a constant influx of patients.
“If everyone could be vaccinated, it would be even better to stop the spread of the disease,” said Dr. Musole Mulambamunva Robert, the medical director of Kavumu Hospital, one of the mpox treatment centers in eastern Congo.
Eastern Congo has been beset by conflict for years, with more than 100 armed groups vying for a foothold in the mineral-rich area near the border with Rwanda. Some have been accused of carrying out mass killings.
