4th Victim of Aspen Air Crash Identified : Disaster: Immigrant had started high-tech company in Santa Ana. He joined the ill-fated trip at the last minute.

Russell Lind, 52, was a man who loved high adventure, a successful insurance executive who felt as comfortable in the board room as on the snowy face of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Lawrence Barrett, 42, and his 45-year-old wife, Karolyn, were owners of an Irvine-based real estate development company which had amassed a sizable fortune in the 20 years since he jumped into the booming Orange County market.

Jimoh (Jim) Ade Yinka Yussuf, 34, was an immigrant from Nigeria who had been laboring to build his own high-tech company, Laser Optimum, in Santa Ana.

The three men, all alumni of the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Karolyn Barrett took time off over the weekend to attend the university’s homecoming, a three-day bash featuring a football match-up against rival Oklahoma State.

They never made it back to Orange County.

Lind, the Barretts and Yussuf were returning home on Monday when the Cessna 210 plane they were in went out of control just after takeoff and plunged into a brushy hillside a few hundred yards from Sardy Field in Aspen, Colo., officials said. There were no survivors.

The crash is under investigation, FAA and National Transportation Safety Board officials said.

On Tuesday, friends, family and co-workers mourned the deaths of the four Orange County residents, all described as outgoing, successful and highly motivated.

In Newport Beach, family and colleagues gathered at Lind’s local insurance office, where he managed a team of 40 salesmen for Franklin Life Insurance Co. of Illinois.

Carol Lind, his ex-wife, spent the day making funeral arrangements and helping two trustees of his estate settle financial matters.

Lind, a former college basketball player who loved outdoor sports, had risen from a part-time life insurance salesman at the firm’s Galesburg, Ill., office to a top executive for the company’s western region.

“Russ had more stamina and endurance than men half his age,” said company spokesman Gordon Becker, referring to a trip Lind made last year to climb the craggy African peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro. “He really enjoyed his life to the fullest.”

Like Lind, Lawrence Barrett was described by family members as an athletic man who loved to mix it up on the playing fields or soar down the ski slopes in his spare time.

In fact, Barrett, who met his wife in Aspen, skied the slopes of the resort town every winter. During the summer, he went fishing off Santa Catalina Island, family members said.

“It was boating and fishing in the summer, skiing in the winter and flying between them,” said his brother, Richard W. Barrett. “He loved his plane and he’s flying for about 15 years.”

“He’s a 10 in business and real estate development,” his brother, Richard W. Barrett, added. “He did more in a year than most people do in a lifetime.”

Yussuf, who started his own Santa Ana-based, one-man company, Laser Optimum, apparently had asked Barrett at the last minute to join the three on their trip to Colorado.

The four had boarded Barrett’s single-engine plane at Sardy Field just after noon Monday, FAA spokesman Mitch Parker said. The weather was clear.

Just as the plane took off, Parker said, it veered off course. Seconds later it turned about 180 degrees and headed straight into a hill about 200 yards from the small county airport. It broke up on impact but did not catch fire.

All day Tuesday, FAA and NTSB investigators were at the scene of the crash, sifting through wreckage. But, investigators said, they were unable to immediately identify the cause of the accident.