Cause of fatal plane crash under investigation

Susan B. Jordan was likely being treated to a sightseeing tour by a longtime friend when his small plane crashed in Utah, killing the pilot and the prominent Mendocino County attorney, investigators said Monday.

Jordan, an experienced pilot, was not at the controls of the Storch Aviation Australia SS-MK4 when it went down Friday, killing her and friend John H. Austin, a health care executive who lived in Oakland and Boulder, Utah.

Austin owned the plane and was piloting it at the time of the crash, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. FAA officials are investigating the accident and have not yet determined a cause.

Garfield County Sheriff’s officials said it appears the single-engine plane clipped a power line, crashed into the road and skidded into a bridge just off Scenic Highway 12, about halfway between Escalante and Boulder.

Complaints from area residents about a low-flying plane indicate that the two may have been sightseeing, said Garfield County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Becki Bronson.

“I think he was probably showing his passenger the lay of the county,” she said Monday.

Moments after the calls, the plane crashed, Bronson said.

Jordan’s family, friends and colleagues will gather at a Ukiah Valley ranch to celebrate her remarkable life on June 21.

The memorial service will be held at the Dark Horse Ranch on Old River Road between Talmage and Hopland, said Ukiah attorney Mary Ann Villwock. The time has not been set.

“I expect that many people will want to attend. She was so involved in so many things and so influential in everything she was involved in,” she said.

Jordan’s high-profile legal clients have included battered women, radicals, environmentalists and medical marijuana growers. She also was passionate about yoga and meditation, the outdoors and flying airplanes.

She would fly to make courtroom appearances around the state, returning home to Mendocino County whenever she could.

In recent years, she preferred staying closer to her Redwood Valley home, said longtime friend Ann Moorman. Jordan and her husband, Ronald Wong, also maintained a home in Berkeley.

Few North Coast residents were aware of her high-profile cases.

She broke new legal ground in her defense of Inez Garcia, a rape victim who had been convicted of shooting and killing one of her assailants. At re-trial in 1977, Jordan successfully argued that Garcia had acted in self defense. It was the first successful murder defense using battered women’s syndrome, Moorman said.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Jordan represented Black Panther party members, civil rights organizers and Emily Harris, a Symbionese Liberation Army member tied to the kidnapping of Bay Area newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. In the late 1990s, she represented SLA fugitive Sara Jane Olson.

Jordan also counseled late Earth First! activist Judi Bari following the unsolved 1990 car bombing that left her crippled. The FBI initially suspected Bari and associate Daryl Cherney were responsible for the bombing.

Bay Area attorney Chris Arguedas, one of the nation’s top-ranked attorneys, said Jordan was a role model. As a young law student, she worked with Jordan on crafting a defense in another battered woman’s case.

“We worked very closely together. That is really why I became a criminal defense lawyer,” Arguedas said.

Jordan credited the Civil Rights movement with her decision to become a criminal defense lawyer. It was a far cry from her job as a copy writer for Glamour magazine in New York, her first following graduation from the University of Michigan.

After reading Michael Harrington’s book, “The Other America,” she reexamined her lifestyle and went back to college, obtaining her master’s degree from Yeshiva University in New York.

She became a teacher in urban ghettoes before the civil rights movement led her to Mississippi and inspired a career in law.

In a 1999 interview, she said her career had been satisfying.

“I have witnessed and participated in some of the great debates of our time. There can be no higher reward,” she said.