Residents of the area told Italian television that they heard the engines of the plane stop and saw fire, before seeing the plane dive into a two-story building that was undergoing restoration.
“I saw something flying in the air, and then a loud noise; it was very scary,” Andrea Speciale, 19, a student, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in a televised interview. “It was already flying low when it dove and crashed.”
Another witness, the owner of a pizza restaurant in San Donato Milanese, the town where the plane crashed, told the news agency Adnkronos that he heard a loud bang and walked out of his shop, then saw the bodies of a young boy and an adult on the ground.
Police footage from the scene showed cars still on fire and a long pipe of smoke coming from the devastated facade of the building, a warehouse with some office space belonging to Milan’s public transportation company.
Firefighters were retrieving the scattered components of the small plane in a large area that had been cordoned off by the authorities. The neighborhood contains an urban mix of residential buildings, large office spaces and warehouses next to a subway terminal.