The Trosen family are missionaries in LaPaz, Bolivia, and their airplane disappeared Sept. 28 in the rainforests of Bolivia.
Gene and Bev Beavers, Paynesville, are cousins to Trosen. “We understand they are looking through very dense jungle,” Beavers said. “We haven’t heard anything new. Last week the World Gospel Mission thought they had a lead about a plane wreckage, but that lead fizzled out. Rescue workers are surveying area villages to see if anyone heard or saw a low flying plane prior to the time of their disappearance,” Beavers added.
Church officials, based in Marion, Ind., were hoping that sightings by farmers and reports by area residents of a low-flying plane near the Amboro National Park would lead them to the plane. In another report, a mute man who had walked two days in the jungle reported seeing a plane wreckage. It was hoped he would to lead them to the wreckage, but he was unable to do so.
“The hardest thing is not knowing whether they are dead or alive or injured in the jungle somewhere,” Bev said. All we can do is wait and see and pray that they find something.”
Beavers said Trosen’s father has gone to Bolivia to be there if they find his son and family.
The Cessna CP-1528 disappeared en route from the village of Yucuma, on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains, to the city of Santa Crus.
The Trosen family was returning from an evangelistic campaign. In the plane were: John and Masako Trosen, their two children, Isaiah, 3, and Sophia, eight months; Juan Carlos Zuazo, pastor of a church in Cristo Viene; and a young seminary couple, Johny Mamani and his wife Silveria Lucia Pinto.
The last radio contact with the plane was around 1 p.m. Sept. 27.
The couple has been in Bolivia since December 1997. The couple had been in Paynesville visiting with Pastor Roy and Alice Olson prior to their return to Bolivia.