'I didn't believe it was happening'

Wendy Bonham waited alone in the dense Missouri forest.

The commuter plane in which she was traveling had just crashed — and the Spanish Fork resident thought she was the only survivor. She would later learn that one of her two traveling companions had also survived.

Bonham crawled out of an emergency exit door, dropped eight feet to the ground and walked away from the flames relatively unscathed, her husband told the Deseret Morning News Thursday.

She called out for survivors but didn't hear a response. Smoke from the suffocating flames made it hard to speak, Russ Bonham said. She didn't know her boss, John Krogh, had escaped minutes earlier and was also crying out for other survivors.

"She didn't know where he was or whether he got out," Russ Bonham said in a phone interview from Missouri's Northeast Regional Medical Center on Thursday.

Krogh, 68, and Bonham, 44, are the only two survivors of Tuesday's commuter jet crash in Missouri that claimed 13 lives. The twin-engine turboprop crashed Tuesday night near Kirksville in northern Missouri. Clark Brenton Ator, 39, an Alpine man and the bishop of his local LDS ward, died in the crash.

Krogh described the tragedy to ABC's "Good Morning America."

"There was just a crashing sound," he said. "I'm sure that was the wing hitting a tree. I just didn't believe that it was happening. As we bounced along through the trees, people started screaming badly. Terrible screams.

He said he fell out of the burning plane through an exit door. "I didn't know we had assigned seats, and I walked in there and sat down in that seat, and that may have saved my life," Krogh said.

The Utahns were traveling with other faculty members of the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine. The group had planned on attending a conference on humanism in medicine, Philip Slocum, dean and vice president for medical affairs at the college, told the Associated Press.

Krogh and Bonham worked together at a Kirksville College office in Orem. Bonham started working there earlier this year, Russ Bonham said. Ator also worked with the office, teaching third- and fourth-year osteopathic medicine students.

Bonham escaped with a broken arm and mild to severe burns over 8 percent of her body. Krogh, of Wallsburg, Wasatch County, suffered a broken left hip and a fracture to his back. Doctors performed emergency hip replacement surgery Tuesday night after the crash, his wife Karen Krogh told the Morning News.

Krogh's broken hip made it impossible for him to walk away from the crash, Karen Krogh said. Instead, he crawled nearly 25 feet away from the wreckage and waited for rescuers in some bushes.

While waiting, Krogh said he saw someone escape from the plane but didn't know it was Bonham.