UPDATE 4:10 PM - McHenry County coroner confirmed Friday afternoon that the pilot killed in the crash was Rob Sherman.
MARENGO - The owner of a plane that crashed into a Marengo, IL cornfield, killing the pilot, over the weekend is longtime atheist activist Rob Sherman of Poplar Grove, local news sources are saying.
Sherman, who ran in the 5th Congressional District as a Green Party candidate this past election, is the national spokesman for the American Atheists and a board member of the Experimental Aircraft Association in Schaumburg.
The plane’s tail number, provided by the National Transportation Safety Board, matches the tail number on Sherman’s home-built Zenair CH601, a light, single-engine 2-seat aircraft, according to local news sources.
The McHenry county coroner says an autopsy will be performed Monday morning to determine the pilot's identity.
Sherman had just announced on his website in late November that he intended to run for Congress in the 12th CD in 2018.
He explained why he was focusing on the downstate district in two years:
I am very well known in Southernmost Illinois and have spent significant time, there, so I should win the 2018 Green Party Primary Election and then win a seat in Congress at the General Election on November 6, 2018.
The 12th District includes the Bald Knob Cross, where I battled, beginning in 2010, to stop an unconstitutional $20,000 grant by the State of Illinois to Friends of the Cross. The grant was to force us taxpayers to pay for the rebuilding of their Christian monument. The United States Supreme Court eventually decided, on January 22, 2013, to not hear my appeal, on the preposterous grounds that, although the Legislative Branch cannot make unconstitutional grants themselves, they supposedly do have "discretion" to make unconstitutional grants if they use an Executive Branch agency as a middleman.
The 12th District is also home to the City of Marion, where I battled 84-year-old "Mayor for Life" Robert Butler over whether a Ten Commandments monument should be erected on the Town Square, to the exclusion of any other religious perspective. Mayor Butler is actually a nice guy. He was first elected Mayor in 1963 and is still Mayor, 53 years later. Mayor Butler will be 90 years old on January 23, 2017. Happy Birthday, Mayor! I think I'll make your Town Square the first place that I go to circulate my Nominating Petitions in September, 2017. That's less than ten months away.
