SANTA FE, N.M. – Nothing could’ve prepared Miquella Benavidez for the phone call she got at work one morning last July.

“He said, ‘Your house is on fire!’ And I, you know, I couldn’t, I didn’t know what he was talking about. And he said, ‘You know, your house blew up. It’s like a plane hit your house,’” Benavidez said.

She says it was a daydream that quickly turned into a real-life nightmare.

“I mean, it was still hot, you know? You could, and just, I just couldn’t believe my eyes,” Benavidez said.

Investigators say a private plane suffered engine failure shortly after taking off from the Santa Fe Regional Airport. The pilot, later identified as renowned California surgeon Randolph Sherman, tried returning to the airport but crashed into Benavidez’s home only seconds later.

Fortunately, no one was home at the time. Benavidez says her two children were in Arizona.

“Otherwise they would have been sleeping in the house,” Benavidez said. “That initial call was heartbreaking because my son thought that I was in the house. And he said, ‘I thought you were dead.'”

But her family lost everything in just a matter of minutes. Only a few walls were left standing.

“It’s just like starting from scratch,” she said.

Benavidez says she made sure the pilot’s insurance company had all the right paperwork.

“They just kept lowballing me left and right. At that point, I broke down, and I told my mom. I said, I’m going to be stuck. I’m going to be stuck picking up the charges for all this,” she said.

An attorney helped Benavidez put together a lawsuit. The lawsuit is asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild her home and clean up the toxic chemicals left after the crash.

“It’s more than fair to ask that they make the Benavidez family whole,” attorney Brian Egolf said. 

Egolf says that’s largely because this crash could’ve been avoided. He says this turn was a mistake and argues that’s what caused the plane to essentially drop out of the sky.

“I don’t believe that there’s going to be a dispute in this case, that the aircraft could have been landed safely had the pilot flown straight, gained altitude, gotten more time, gathered his thoughts and created a plan with air traffic control,” he said. 

Despite the circumstances, Benavidez says she’s never heard from the pilot’s family 

“Everything was taken away within seconds, and they didn’t make it right,” she said. 

Benavidez says a lawsuit is not how she wanted to move forward.

“I’m sad that the pilot lost his life. And I don’t know what went on there, but it’s like we lost a part of our life too,” she said.

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