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'I still imagine her being with me:' Fiancé remembers flying, life partner who died in St. Augustine plane crash

Marianne Fox died when her plane ran off the runway last week. Her fiancé, Jim Bourke, was flying next to her when she made a distress call.

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Marianne Fox is being remembered not only for her love of life and for her love of others, but also for the time she enjoyed in the sky with her flying partner and fiancé Jim Bourke.

"I definitely looked forward to being married to her," he told First Coast News."I really thought of myself being married to her. We were very close. We were together all the time."

Their passion for flying took them from Oregon to Florida, where tragically Fox's final flight ended beyond the runway at Northeast Florida Regional Airport in St. Augustine last week

"St Augustine is a challenging situation because the runway ends very abruptly into a marsh, and she just rolled off that runway, I guess, into the marsh and that's where she passed away," Bourke said.

Bourke was flying next to her in his own plane, in formation, something they have done many times before in an aerobatic plane, although they were not doing stunts at the time.

He says he heard her make a distress call and gave her space to land. He tried to find her once he learned she didn't make the runway.

"When I heard the news that she had gone off the runway, of course I looked for her from the air, and I didn't know where she was. I didn't see her. I didn't understand where in the marsh where she was," Bourke explained.

Her plane was found upside down. He believes she drowned.

Bourke doesn't want to speculate about the cause of the crash. Instead, he's focusing on the 16 years of memories they created. 

Credit: Courtesy: Jim Bourke
Marianne Fox was killed in plane crash at the Northeast Regional Airport in St. Augustine last week.

"I still imagine her being with me. It's very hard to imagine that she can't be there for me. But I have to accept that's the way it is, and I wouldn't say that I am okay. Who would be? But it gets better every day and I have a lot of great family," he said.

Fox's funeral is set for March 10 at 11 a.m at Dallas United Methodist Church in Dallas, Oregon.

The FAA and the NTSB are in investigating the crash.

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