Mourners gathered Sunday in Hillsboro to remember a young man whose dreams of traversing the bright blue skies as a commercial pilot were cut tragically short last week.
Barrett Bevacqua, 20, was one of two people killed when a small airplane they were flying slammed into a house in Newberg on Tuesday.
A third person aboard the plane was gravely injured in the crash.
Through turns of tears and laughter, family, friends and former coaches recalled Bevacqua’s boundless passion and heart during a memorial at the Hillsboro Aero Academy, where the trio had met and become friends.
“He was shining light on all of us,” his father Matt Bevacqua said. “He was caring and protective.”
About 300 people filled folding chairs at the edge of the flight training school’s tarmac.
As a boy, Bevacqua had played on the Wilshire Riverside baseball team in Northeast Portland that made it to the Little League World Series in 2015.
Later, he became a 6-foot-2 varsity lineman for Lakeridge High School in Lake Oswego, where he also earned nearly a 4.0 GPA.
He loved to sing country music songs and hunt, those who spoke at the memorial said. He was also an amateur chef who could dish up deviled eggs or a Thanksgiving dinner with as much ease as he served kindness and light-hearted humor.
“His knives were sharp but his edges soft,” said Matt Farr, a youth sports coach and family friend who had known Bevacqua since he was 7 years old.
Despite a bevy of interests and talents, the young man had harbored dreams of flying since he was a child, said Matt Bevacqua. He and his wife now live in Arizona.
“Most parents watch ‘Finding Nemo’ or ‘Lion King’ with their 2-year-old,” he said. “We were watching ‘Top Gun,’ probably a thousand times.”
After earning his diploma from Lakeridge in 2021 he went to play football at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction. He left the college earlier this year to enroll in the Hillsboro Aero Academy, which partners with the Horizon Air Ascend Pilot academy to train commercial pilots.
That’s where Bevacqua met 22-year-old pilot instructor Michele Cavallotti, who had originally moved to Oregon from Italy to learn to fly, and 20-year-old Emily Hurd. The three eventually became an inseparable trio and roommates.
Bevacqua began the program in March and threw his heart and soul into the program, friends and family said.
“He loved flying to the point where during my going away party he studied for one of his exams at the party the entire time,” said Kendall Baldwin. “I gave him a hard time about that, but it also made me happy because I had never seen him so passionate about anything.”
Bevacqua, Cavalloti and Hurd were flying a Piper Seminole on Tuesday when it suddenly began to lose control above Newberg, a city about 20 miles southwest of Portland, and spiral toward the ground, according to police and witnesses.
The plane smashed through the roof of a residence on North Cedar Street, breaking apart and falling into the house and backyard.
Firefighters arrived on the scene and determined Cavallotti and Bevacqua were dead. Hurd was airlifted to a hospital with serious injuries.
People were inside the house when the plane struck but managed to evacuate without injury. No one on the ground was injured by the plane crash, according to Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue.
Officials said the Newberg-Dundee Police Department, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the cause of the crash. It remains unclear who was controlling the plane at the time of the accident.
Oregon has recorded five fatal airplane crashes in the past two years, federal transportation safety records show.
Hurd suffered lung trauma, sternal and rib fractures, pelvic fractures and a brain bruise as a result of the crash, her sister Jenny Hurd wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday.
Emily Hurd continues to recover, according to her sister.
“Please pray for the swelling to go down in and near her spine,” Jenny Hurd wrote Sunday on Facebook. “Please pray for her right leg and the nerves to heal.”
At the memorial service, Matt Bevacqua said he had met with Cavallotti’s family, who had arrived from Italy, and that they had all recently visited Hurd and her relatives at the hospital.
“We established an amazing bond with two additional families who are going through a tragic accident,” Matt Bevacqua said. “That’s what it is — a tragic accident.”
