Congress may honor NC plane crash victims by naming six creeks after them

Six creeks along the coast of North Carolina would be named in honor of six people killed in a plane crash off the Outer Banks last spring, under bills now before Congress.

Both U.S. senators and all 14 House members from the state are backing the Down East Remembrance Act, introduced in both chambers this week. U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy, a Republican who represents Carteret County where the six people lived, spoke briefly about it on the floor of the House.

“The Down East Remembrance Act gives exact latitudes and longitudes to the creeks’ locations,” Murphy said. “They will be named after Noah Styron, Hunter Parks, Cole McGinnis, Stephanie Fulcher, Jacob Taylor and (Michael) Daily Shepard. Upon adoption, these names will forever become part of the fabric of Eastern North Carolina.”

Styron, McGinnis, Shepard and Tayor were students at East Carteret High School; Fulcher was McGinnis’ mother, and Parks was Fulcher’s boyfriend. They were returning from a duck hunting trip in Hyde County, flying across Pamlico Sound to Beaufort, when the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on Feb. 13, 2022.

The bill does not honor the plane’s pilot, Ernest Durwood Rawls of Greenville, or his son, Jeffrey Worthington Rawls, who also died in the crash.

The idea behind the bill originated with friends and family members who found bodies of water in Carteret County that did not have official names. In August, they erected signs atop 16-foot poles designating each creek and asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make them official.

Now Congress appears poised to do that.

“Eastern North Carolina continues to grieve the victims lost in the tragic plane crash last year,” Sen. Thom Tillis said in a written statement. “I am proud to introduce legislation to name creeks in honor of the North Carolinians who lost their lives on that fateful day. I thank Congressman Murphy for his leadership in this effort and hope my colleagues will take swift action to take up and pass this legislation.”

Federal investigators have not determined what caused the plane to go down. But the families of the four teens and Fulcher sued Rawls’ estate and two Wilmington companies, one that Rawls worked for and another that owned the plane.

The lawsuit alleged that Rawls disregarded instructions of air traffic controllers, flew into restricted airspace in bad weather with no visibility and became spatially disoriented. The lawsuit was settled for $15 million last month.

Washington Bureau reporter Danielle Battaglia contributed to this story.