Port Jefferson Station native dies in skydiving accident, family says

Time and again, Joshua Butzke’s family tried to talk him out of skydiving.

This week, their worst fears came true. The 25-year-old native of Port Jefferson Station leapt from a plane Sunday during a Florida skydiving trip and his open parachute spiraled out of control before he hit the ground. Butzke, a financial planner, was later pronounced dead at a hospital, police said.

The Comsewogue High School graduate was making his 14th jump of the weekend when he bounded out of the plane at 13,000 feet Sunday after taking off from Skydive City in Zephyrhills, Florida, said police and family members.

His parachute opened at about 3,500 feet but went into a spiral at about 800 feet, they said.

On Tuesday, his father, Rich Butzke, choked back sobs as he recalled his son’s passion for skydiving, and their many arguments about it over the years.

“I was dead set against it,” the Port Jefferson Station man said, adding that his son would tell him, “ ‘If anything goes wrong, I’ll die doing what I love.’ ”

“That’s the only thing I’m hanging onto now,” Rich Butzke said.

Joshua Butzke loved extreme activities such as scuba diving and cage diving with Great White sharks, according to his family, but skydiving grabbed something deep inside him, and he couldn’t get enough of it.

By the time he made his final jump, he had 85 under his belt. Butzke had purchased his own skydiving equipment and planned to use it on an upcoming family trip to Hawaii.

It remained unclear Tuesday what sent his parachute into a spin, and police as well as the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating. The FAA is looking hard at the packing of the parachute, officials said.

Eva Wein, Butzke’s older sister, said her brother was adventurous from an early age. He was a stellar high school athlete and a leader on the soccer team. He later played soccer at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

For the past three years, he’s worked as a financial planner in Norwalk, Connecticut.

His concerns about the world reflected a maturity beyond his 25 years, relatives said. He contributed to numerous causes, such as fighting Alzheimer’s disease, and even set up a scholarship fund to help students taught by his father, a business teacher at Patchogue-Medford High School.

Like their father, Wein, 31, had lobbied her brother to give up skydiving, as recently as at the family’s New Year’s get-together.

“We’d say, ‘You’re going to die,’ ” she said.

But no convincing did the trick.

“He loved it,” Wein said. “He lived for it.”

The only thing he loved more than skydiving was his family, she said, and though her brother lived in Connecticut, he came back to Long Island for family visits nearly every weekend. Wein said she named Butzke the godfather of her second child, Elias. She said she was texting him about the 15-month-old’s first swimming lesson a few hours before Butzke’s final jump.

“He took great pride in how close he was to his family,” she said. “We’ll never be whole again.”

At Skydive City, a parachuting center in central Florida, general manager David “T.K.” Hayes said Joshua Butzke’s right brake line on the parachute was still set in a locked position after the fall, when the brake usually has been released.

Before a parachute opens, Hayes said, a free-falling skydiver can drop at speeds in excess of 120 mph. A skydiver struggling with a spiraling parachute might well fall at 70 mph, Hayes said, and Butzke may have had less than 20 seconds between the start of the spiral and when he hit the ground.

Hayes said skydiving is safer in 2018 than it has ever been and his facility handled 72,000 jumps last year without incident. The facility had one fatality in 2017, he said.

Back in Port Jefferson Station, Butzke’s father said he has gained strength from those around him after his son’s death. It’s a largely unfamiliar role for him, Rich Butzke said.

“I’m the guy who fixes everything,” said the man who coaches soccer. “When a kid falls on the field, I’m the one running out there with the first aid kit.”

He added, “I can’t fix this.”

Joshua Butzke’s funeral is scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday at I.J. Morris Funeral Home in Dix Hills. The family said donations in his name will go to his scholarship fund, which they plan to rename The Joshua Butzke Memorial Fund. Checks can be sent to Patchogue-Medford High School, attention Carol Grimm, 181 Buffalo Ave. Medford, N.Y. 11763.

With Khristopher J. Brooks