The Collart family during a trip to North Carolina. (Family photo/The Washington Post)
Life for the Collart family had already been hard these past three years before they learned of the crash off the Australian coast on Sunday that took the lives of Cpl. Spencer R. Collart and two of his fellow U.S. Marines.
In March 2020, just when the coronavirus pandemic was settling in, the family’s Virginia home burned down, leaving little more than embers.
Last week, the beloved family dog, Stella, died at age 12 from cancer that had quickly spread through her mouth.
Now, the family is mourning the loss of Spencer, 21, who went down with the Marine V-22B Osprey hybrid aircraft he was in when a routine training exercise suddenly went awry. The U.S. Marine Corps says the cause is still under investigation.
The grief upon grief is unbearable for the Collart family.
“We’re hoping this is the last one because we just don’t know how much we could take, you know?” his sister, Gwyneth Collart, 19, said Tuesday.
So far, what is known about the crash is the following:
At about 9:30 a.m. Sunday, Spencer Collart and 22 other Marines were aboard the aircraft as it flew over a tropical forest on Melville Island off the coast of the Australian continent during a drill that included the militaries of Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor.
Suddenly, the aircraft went down.
In his role as crew chief aboard the Osprey, Collart would have worked to secure the safety of everyone onboard while the aircraft failed.
Twenty of those passengers survived, with one still hospitalized in critical condition on Tuesday, while two others were in stable condition, according to the U.S. Marine Corps. The other two Marines who died were Capt. Eleanor V. LeBeau, 29, the pilot from Belleville, Ill., and Maj. Tobin J. Lewis, 37, the executive officer at the Darwin base in Australia, who is from Jefferson, Colo.
News of the crash triggered an outpouring of grief and messages of condolences, among them from President Biden and first lady Jill Biden. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine (D) on Tuesday called for a “thorough investigation into what happened.”
Some people on social media simply called the three deceased Marines “heroes.”
That description fits with what the Collarts know to be true about Spencer.
The lanky 6-foot-2 former defenseman on his high school lacrosse team loved being a Marine, said his father, Bart Collart. Spencer Collart announced that he planned to join the Marine Corps after taking an aviation course as a teenager, enlisting the day after he turned 18 with plans to become an aircraft crew chief and, then, a pilot.
When a local recruiter suggested that Collart’s upper body was too slender for the pull-up requirements in boot camp, he practiced on the thick limb of a tree behind one of the rental houses the family stayed in after the fire. Eventually, he was able to do at least 11 pull-ups on that limb, Bart Collart said.
While in training to become crew chief on the Osprey, Spencer Collart called his dad to describe an exercise that involved having to find his way out of a cage that had been submerged upside down into a pool while strapped into a helicopter seat and wearing a full flight suit and boots.
“And, after that, you do the whole thing again blindfolded,” Bart Collart recalled his son saying. “I said, ‘Spencer, that just sounds like a horrible thing to go through.’ And he goes, ‘Dad, it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done.’ I said, ‘You’re in the right place, buddy.’”
Before Sunday’s accident, Spencer Collart was grieving the loss of Stella, disappointed that he wasn’t around to say goodbye when the affectionate schnauzer had to be put down, his family said.
But he was also excited about the new house the family had built where their old home had burned down in Arlington, Va.
He had seen the nearly completed home during a visit in December from his base in Darwin — scoping out the bedroom in the front that would be his, Bart Collart said.
“Every time we spoke to him on the phone, he would be adamant, saying: ‘Don’t you guys sell that house. We’ve got to keep this house,’” Collart said. “I think he had visions of one day coming back here and raising a family.”
Spencer Collart never got to see the house when it was finished. But, the family said they believe that he spent his last hours feeling fulfilled.
“He died doing what he loved and he died a hero,” Gwyneth Collart said. “We knew from the beginning that when he said he wanted to join the military that that was the perfect thing for him.”
