[chris]

A single-engine Piper PA-28 Archer II making an emergency landing struck and killed Army Sgt. 1st Class Ommy Irizarry and his 9-year-old daughter, Oceana, near the waterline at Caspersen Beach in Venice, Florida, on July 27, 2014, investigators said.

The plane came down on the Gulf Coast beach about a mile south of the Venice Municipal Airport around 2:45 p.m., the National Transportation Safety Board said. Irizarry, 36, of Fort Stewart, Georgia, was pronounced dead at the scene. Oceana was flown to All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg with critical head injuries and died the following day.

The pilot, Karl Kokomoor, 57, of Englewood, and his passenger, David Theen, 60, also of Englewood, were not injured. Kokomoor told investigators the engine ran roughly minutes after takeoff and lost power as he approached Venice. He said he declared an emergency by radio and, fearing that ditching the fixed-gear plane in deep water would flip it, steered for a spot near the shore where he believed no one was standing.

"It was only after I landed and we exited the plane that I realized that there were people on the beach," Kokomoor said in a statement released through his attorney. "I never saw them."

An airport employee placed one of the first 911 calls after the pilot radioed that he could not reach the runway, the NTSB said. When the pilot did not report his position, the employee asked another departing pilot to relay it and then told dispatchers the plane was down on the beach about a mile south of the field. Additional calls came from beachgoers and from Irizarry's family.

In its final report, approved in May 2017, the NTSB attributed the crash to a total loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined, saying a teardown and a test run of the engine turned up no mechanical fault. The board listed the pilot's failure to see the two people in his landing path as a contributing factor.

Irizarry, a platoon sergeant in the Army's Warrior Transition Battalion, had been at the beach with his family on his wedding anniversary. He and Oceana were later honored among a group of organ and tissue donors on a float in the 2016 Rose Parade.