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“Tarzan” Actor Joe Lara Among 7 Plane Crash Victims

By Michael Bamidele

31 May 2021   |   9:51 am

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American actor Joe Lara, who is best known for his role in the TV series "Tarzan: The Epic Adventures", has died in a plane crash. He was 58-years-old. Lara along with his wife and Christian diet guru Gwen S Lara are among the seven people who are presumed to have died when a small jet…

Joe Lara | Image: Rex

American actor Joe Lara, who is best known for his role in the TV series “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures”, has died in a plane crash. He was 58-years-old.

Lara along with his wife and Christian diet guru Gwen S Lara are among the seven people who are presumed to have died when a small jet crashed into a lake near the town of Smyrna in Tennessee on Saturday.

The small business jet crashed at around 11:00 am local time on Saturday, shortly after taking off from the Smyrna, Tennessee airport for Palm Beach, Florida, Rutherford County Fire & Rescue (RCFR) said on Facebook.

The plane went down into Percy Priest Lake, about 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Nashville.

The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed seven people had been aboard the plane, CNN reported.

By Saturday night, operations had switched from search and rescue to recovery efforts, RCFR incident commander Captain Joshua Sanders told a press conference.

“We are no longer in an attempt to (look) for live victims at this point so we’re now recovering as much as we can from the crash site,” he said.

On Sunday afternoon, RCFR said on Facebook that recovery operations had found “several components of the aircraft as well as human remains” in a debris field about half a mile wide.

Operations would continue until dark and resume Monday morning, RCFR wrote.

Lara played Tarzan in the 1989 television movie “Tarzan in Manhattan.” He later starred in the television series “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures,” which ran from 1996-1997.

Joe and Gwen married in 2018 (Picture: Remnant Fellowship)

His wife Gwen Shamblin Lara, whom he married in 2018, was the leader of a Christian weight-loss group called Weigh Down Ministries. She founded the group in 1986, and then in 1999 founded the Remnant Fellowship Church in Brentwood, Tennessee.

The couple married in 2018 and are survived by two adult children from Gwen’s first marriage; Michael Shamblin and Elizabeth Hannah.