Residents of Ashbury Subdivision off County Line Road are used to the sound of aircraft. Their neighborhood lies below planes heading into Huntsville International Airport.

So when Johanna Roller, out for an afternoon run at about 1:30 p.m. Monday, heard a low flying plane overhead, she wasn’t overly concerned. Then she noticed a twin-engine plane was headed right for her.

“I saw the plane coming out of the sky and thought it was going to hit the street in front of me,” Roller said. “It was gliding in, then a wing hit a tree, it spun and nosedived and hit the ground.”

Limestone County Coroner Mike West said at 5:30 p.m. he was headed to the state forensic lab with the bodies of a man and woman, both occupants of the six-seat Beechcraft B60 that plummeted into a construction site. No one was injured on the ground.

“I have a male and a female and both are burned beyond recognition,” West said. “The only way they can be positively identified is through dental records. Everything on the plane was burned up, so we could find no ID.”

In a 3:30 p.m. news conference near the site, Madison Police Chief Larry Muncey said Huntsville International Airport had tentatively identified the two dead people from a flight plan that the pilot filed, but he said officials of the National Transportation Safety Board, who were due onsite within the hour, would have to release the names after notification of next of kin.

Reports say the aircraft left Boca Raton, Fla., about 9:30 a.m. Monday and stopped in Huntsville for refueling with a flight destination of Nashville. The pilot took off from Huntsville at 1:17 p.m. and the pilot was said to have radioed that he was having “engine trouble” just after crossing over into Tennessee.

He was diverted back to Huntsville and came down just 1 1/2 miles short of the runway.

“I saw that it was so close to the ground,” said a badly shaken Roller. “I knew they had to have an issue. I thought it was coming straight for me and would have hit me if it had not hit the trees.”

Roller said, “I just took off running,” as did several construction workers from an adjacent site who also feared an explosion, she said.

Several trees were clipped off at the site. Responders from Huntsville, Madison, Monrovia and Athens were on the scene in minutes.

Madison County Commissioner Dale Strong, who said he was paged out although the site is not in his district but in Madison-annexed Limestone County, said firefighters extinguished the flaming wreckage with water and Class A foam within 10 minutes of arriving.

Aviation fuel poured from the wings of the wrecked plane and Hazmat workers placed absorbent material at the edge of a stream so the fuel did not leak into the water.

“I can only guess that the pilot did a great job not to hit any of the residents,” Strong said.

Almost everyone in the subdivision, including many federal employees, were home due to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Streets near the crash were swarming with concerned residents who had heard the crash and came to investigate, Strong said.

Police cordoned off the crash site so no one but emergency personnel was allowed within a quarter of a mile.