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SANTA ANA, Calif. — On a breezy morning, Floria Hakimi smiled as her photo was snapped on the steps leading up to a small plane that was supposed to usher her to a workshop for real estate agents in Southern California.
“Flying out to LA,” she posted on her Instagram account with the photo of her donning sunglasses and a broad grin.
Later that day, the twin-engine Cessna 414 carrying the 62-yearold real estate agent and four others plummeted out of the sky and crashed into the parking lot of an Orange County strip mall, killing everyone on board.
Hakimi and two victims were co-workers at Pacific Union International, a San Francisco Bay Area real estate firm. One of them, 42-year-old Lara Shepherd, was married to the plane’s 53-year-old pilot, Scott Shepherd.
Another was 29-year-old Nasim Ghanadan, who saw Hakimi as a mentor in the real estate industry, Ghanadan’s brother said. Hakimi’s 32-year-old son, Navid Hakimi, was also a passenger on the trip.
The group left Sunday for the Tom Ferry Success Summit in Anaheim, California, a business conference popular with real estate agents, said Terri Tiffany, a spokeswoman for Pacific Union.
Ghanadan loved to cook Persian and American food and loved dancing. She grew up in the Bay Area and was quick to make friends with just about everyone she met, said Aryan Ghanadan, her 19-year-old brother.
“She was just larger than life, always, always laughing,” he said. “Just always the life of the party.”
The plane took off from Buchanan Field Airport in Concord, California, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The pilot declared an emergency but didn’t state the nature of his problem before crashing about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from John Wayne Airport, striking four parked cars, National Transportation Safety Board investigator Albert Nixon said Monday.
Nixon didn’t know how much time elapsed between the call and the crash.
The plane was heading to the airport southeast of Los Angeles and had been cleared to land when it came down in the parking lot of a Staples store and a CVS pharmacy, NTSB officials said.
There was no fire and nobody on the ground was hurt, Orange County fire officials said.
Witnesses watched in horror as the plane flew low over the shopping area near the upscale South Coast Plaza mall and nosedived into the parking lot.
Customers ran out of a nearby restaurant and saw the wreckage of the white plane with green and blue trim.
The 1973 Cessna was certified with the FAA through October 2019, online records show.