(CNN) -- A man whose financial management business is under investigation faked a life-or-death emergency in his private aircraft before secretly parachuting out and letting his plane crash in the Florida panhandle, authorities said Monday.
The pilot, identified as Marcus Schrenker, 38, later checked into a hotel in Alabama under a fake name and then put on a black cap and fled into woods, authorities in Alabama said, according to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office in Milton, Florida.
Authorities are searching for the pilot.
The manager of the airport in Indiana from which the six-seat Piper PA-46 took off said that no one else was on board at takeoff.
Public documents list Schrenker as president of an Indianapolis agency called Heritage Wealth Management. Records also show Heritage Insurance Services at the same address. The address is listed in the telephone directory as the site of Icon Wealth Management.
Those three companies are under investigation for possible securities violations, according to Jim Gavin with the Indiana secretary of state's office. A search warrant was served in connection with that investigation December 31.
CNN's attempts to reach a representative for Schrenker were unsuccessful. The phone number for his business was disconnected, and public records do not list his current home phone number.
Schrenker "appears to have intentionally abandoned the plane after putting it on autopilot over the Birmingham, Alabama, area and parachuting to the ground" Sunday night, the sheriff's office said in a news release.
The plane crashed at 9:15 p.m. CT on Sunday in a swampy area of the Blackwater River in East Milton, Florida, authorities said. It's unclear what time Schrenker made the earlier distress call. He told air traffic controllers that the window of his plane had imploded and he was bleeding profusely.
That call came in when the aircraft was about 35 miles southwest of Birmingham. Controllers tried to tell the pilot to divert the flight to Pell City, Alabama, but he did not respond. The plane appeared to have been put on autopilot around 2,000 feet altitude, Haines said.
The plane had been scheduled to land in Destin, Florida, authorities said.
After the call came in, military aircraft were dispatched to intercept the plane. The jets spotted the Piper and deployed flares to illuminate the plane as it was flying and noticed that its door was open and the cockpit was dark, according to the Santa Rosa authorities. The jets continued to follow the plane until it crashed. Rescuers searched the area where the plane went down and began a search for the pilot.
Meanwhile, Schrenker reportedly was more than 220 miles north of the crash site.
The Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office got a call at 2:26 a.m. Monday from the Childersburg Police Department in Alabama saying that a white male, identified as Schrenker by his Indiana driver's license, approached a Childersburg officer at a store.
Schrenker, who was wet from the knees down and had no injuries, told the officer that he had been in a canoeing accident with friends, the Santa Rosa Sheriff's Office said in a news release. Schrenker had goggles that looked like they were made for "flying," according to the release.
The Childersburg police didn't know about the plane crash, so they took Schrenker to a nearby hotel, authorities said. When police found out about the crash, they went back to the hotel and entered Schrenker's room. He was not there, they said.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/12/florida.plane.crash/
