Her daughters are “playing in heaven,” the Connecticut mom of two girls crushed in their home by a former Microsoft exec’s plummeting private plane said in a poignant Facebook posting yesterday.
“My beautiful Angel,” Joann Mitchell, 39, said of daughter Sadé Brantley, 13. “I can’t begin to imagine my life without you. You and Madisyn were my world,” she said of the teen’s tiny sister, who was just a year old.
“I take comfort in knowing that you and Madisyn are playing in heaven,” she wrote. “But I would have given anything just to hold you again.”
The mom made an emotional, surprise appearance last night at a local vigil for the girls, who died when pilot Bill Henningsgaard lost control and crashed just a mile from the runway at Tweed New Haven Airport in East Haven.
Henningsgaard, of Medina, Wash., was attempting a landing.
The bodies of Sadé and Madisyn were recovered yesterday along with those of Henningsgaard, 54, and his son, Maxwell, 17, who was also on the plane.
Bill and Maxwell had been headed to Yale University as part of an East Coast tour of potential colleges for the son.
Mitchell had posted a picture of her beaming teen and bubbly baby on her Facebook page less than 24 hours after the tragedy.
She escaped after the plane crash, but couldn’t reach the kids.
“Joanne is here!” a cry went out when she arrived at yesterday’s vigil, which was attended by some 300 mourners.
Sadé’s friend, Autumn Hernandez, 12, said Mitchell was a protective mom who loved her kids. The family moved in only about a year ago. “They were a really tight family,” the girl told The Post.
In 2009, Henningsgaard and his 84-year-old mother had to be rescued after an equipment failure during a flight from their native Astoria, Ore., to Seattle forced him to ditch his plane in the Columbia River.