A federal jury in Greenville, Mississippi, acquitted former engineer James Michael Fisher on Thursday, clearing him of charges tied to the criminal investigation of a 2017 military plane crash that killed 16 service members onboard, according to The Associated Press. The jury found Fisher not guilty after an eight-day trial in federal court.
The case focused on what prosecutors said were false statements and alleged obstruction during the government’s review of the crash, which involved a KC-130T transport plane. The aircraft broke apart in the sky and the wreckage fell into soybean fields near Itta Bena, Mississippi, where the debris was reported to have spread across two to three miles of farmland.
AP’s account traced the investigation to work done years earlier at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex in Warner Robins, Georgia. In 2011, military investigators said civilian maintenance personnel failed to identify defects in a cracked and corroded propeller blade installed on the KC-130T, and investigators said the blade broke apart during flight on July 10, 2017.
The flight was described as traveling from Cherry Point, North Carolina to El Centro, California, and the plane carried Marines and a Navy corpsman. AP said 15 Marines and one Navy corpsman were killed, and it described the crash as the deadliest Marine Corps air disaster since 2005, when a transport helicopter went down during a sandstorm in Iraq.
Prosecutors said a federal grand jury in Mississippi indicted Fisher in 2024, after he had retired. AP reported that the indictment accused Fisher of lying to federal agents about changes to inspection procedures during a 2021 investigation, and it alleged the conduct suggested he was part of a cover-up that shifted blame to maintenance technicians.
In response, Fisher’s attorney, Steve Farese, told AP that someone else cleared technicians to change how propellers were inspected while Fisher was in Brazil. Farese also argued Fisher did not lie when he told investigators that no documents allowing maintenance changes had been signed in 2011, because the propeller in question was worked on days before the form was signed, AP reported.
Farese also said in his interview with AP that “Nobody did it intentionally,” adding that, as one witness put it, there were “10 different ways” for the blade to pass through inspection and be missed or put back into the system accidentally, and that the defense said there was “no clarity” in the trial about what exactly happened.
AP reported that prosecutors did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The indictment, according to AP, alleged that engineers at the Georgia base approved about 30 changes to propeller inspection procedures from 2008 to 2017, despite Fisher earlier not producing documents during the investigation that began in 2021, and that investigators concluded “they could no longer trust Fisher.”
After the crash, AP said the Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force grounded some or all of their C-130s for a time, including examining and replacing propeller blades. AP also noted that families gathered near the crash site a year later to dedicate a memorial to “Yanky 72,” the plane’s call sign.
In testimony summarized by AP, AP said the Marines aboard included six from an elite Marine Raider battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, headed for pre-deployment training in Yuma, Arizona, and nine other Marines were based in New York. The plane was based at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York.