(WWJ) -- An 11-year-old girl is on a long road to recovery after a plane crash in northern Michigan over the weekend claimed the lives of four others, including her own father.
Laney Perdue was the sole survivor of the crash on Beaver Island on Saturday as a twin-engine plane crashed while flying into the small airport.
The four others aboard the aircraft -- her father, Mike Perdue, aspiring winery owners Kate Leese and Adam Kendall, and the pilot, whose name has not been released -- all died.
The young girl and her father were airlifted from the island in Lake Michigan to a hospital in Petoskey. Mike Perdue died en route, while Laney survived.
Speaking on Good Morning America on Tuesday, Laney’s mother, Christie Perdue, said her daughter believes her dad saved her life.
“Laney told me in the hospital that her last memory is that dad just grabbed her and held her really, really tight, and in my heart I know that it protected her,” she said through tears.
Laney was transferred to Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, where she is recovering with five broken bones -- all on one side of her body.
“I believe that it would make sense to me that if her injuries were on the one side, the other side was her dad, and he was holding her,” Christie Perdue said.
Investigators are still investigating what led to the crash.
A Coast Guard helicopter crew was conducting a training flight in the area on Saturday when they were alerted to the crash.
The Perdue family lives in Gaylor, where Mike worked as a realtor, while Leese and Kendall had reportedly recently moved to Beaver Island and were in the process of opening a winery there.
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A friend of the Perdue family has organized a GoFundMe page to support the family. As of 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the fundraiser had received more than $95,000 of its $150,000 goal in just two days.
As the girl continues to recover in the hospital, her mother said she is overcome with grief and happiness at the same time.
“I ran into the hospital because you don’t know, they don’t tell you anything. I didn’t know if there was burns or if she hit her head or if she was gonna walk, and then she just said ‘hi, mom.’ So I just knew at that moment that that part was going to be OK,” Perdue said.
Beaver Island is a popular tourist destination for many Michiganders, located about 30 miles northwest of Petoskey and Charlevoix in Lake Michigan. It is the largest island in the lake, and third-largest in Michigan, behind Lake Superior’s Isle Royale and Lake Huron’s Drummond Island.
A report from the Petoskey News says plane crashes are uncommon in the area, as this is the first crash of an Island Airways aircraft. Another area airline saw a deadly crash back in 2001.
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