A pilot, Jeff Hefner, died along with Adina Azarian, daughter of GOP and NRA donors; her 2-year-old daughter; and the child’s live-in nanny, Evadnie Smith when his jet crashed into a hilly wooded region after passing through restricted airspace over Washington, D.C.

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Who was Jeff Hefner?

Jeff Hefner was the pilot of the Virginia plane that crashed in rural Virginia and ended up killing 4 people.

Hefner was referred to as ‘Mr. Safety’, and had more than 40 years of aviation experience, according to members of his family and previous customers. He served on the board of directors of the pilots union and was a retired Southwest Airlines pilot. He was qualified to operate aircraft as large as Boeing 737s and held the highest level of Federal Aviation Administration medical clearance, according to the Washington Post.

Hefner spent more than 25,000 hours flying and worked as an airplane technician over his 25 years with Southwest. Hefner was referred to as Mr. Safety by Florida attorney Dan Newlin, who frequently hired him to fly him to various locales. “When it came to flying, he was always super serious, super cautious, and very focused,” Newlin said. “He knew aviation inside and out. It was his passion.”

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After the Cessna entered restricted territory over Washington, two fighter fighters were dispatched to investigate. It is believed that they observed Hefner slumped over and unconscious before the aircraft started to lose height and crashed.

Hefner’s former business associates John MacDonald and Rob McBride have now claimed in an article published in The US Sun that he frequently failed to complete plane maintenance and acted threateningly, including brandishing a revolver at MacDonald.

During an interview, MacDonald mockingly said, “Mr. Safety? The Grim Reaper would be my moniker for Jeff. According to the partners, Hefner admitted to them in The US Sun that he frequently used the substances, especially when he was flying long distances.

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“One of the things that ended our relationship and business is that he would take Oxycontin, which he chewed on like he was going crazy. We caught him with them, he pulled this bottle of pills out from his briefcase and took them with some vodka he’d been keeping in the refrigerator. He told me and Rob that he had two different doctors for two different things, one to okay him to fly and the other he called a ‘friendly’ who would prescribe him Oxy,” MacDonald added.

The 49-year-old daughter of prominent GOP and NRA donors John and Barbara Rumpel, Adina Azarian, was a passenger on the flight. She worked as a luxury Hamptons realtor. In a message to The New York Times hours later, a grieving Rumpel claimed his daughter and granddaughter had just left his North Carolina estate after a four-day visit when the jet plummeted out of the sky at a pace of, in his words, “20,000 feet-a-minute.”