The children of 56-year-old Birger Greg Bacino, a San Diego resident who died last summer in a Los Padres forest plane crash , are suing the deceased pilot, David Martz; the airplane’s owner, Poddoubnyi Alexandrovich; and Pacific Coast Flyers — the club that rented out the Cessna 182F — for negligence that led to their father’s death.
Bacino was a trial lawyer turned business owner. His company Premier Medical Management Systems was charged in 2007 in a multimillion-dollar workers’ compensation scam. Bacino previously pled guilty to “capping,” illegally soliciting business for a law firm. In 2014, he lost a $14 million personal bankruptcy case to La Jolla Bank. Most recently, he worked at Ftlb LLC, a medical management company he cofounded. On August 6, Bacino hired Martz to fly him from San Diego to an August 6 business meeting in San Luis Obispo.
One of the last people to see Martz alive that night at the San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport, a pilot in training, told The Santa Barbara Independent she noticed Martz because “he wasn’t drinking.” “It’s really bizarre they would just crash,” she added in a phone interview.