A longtime abortion opponent in Wichita and an activist in the Republican Party has been killed in a plane crash in Nebraska.
A 1963 Cessna 172 aircraft went down in a field Tuesday northeast of Chambers, in Holt County, Nebraska. The pilot, 69-year-old Mark Gietzen of Wichita, was killed. The plane was on a flight from Newton to North Dakota at the time of the crash.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration had investigators at the scene to look into the cause of the crash.
Gietzen was a former leader of the Kansas Republican Party and he was chairman of the Kansas Coalition for Life. He had paid for a recount of the August, 2022 election where Kansas voters rejected the “Value Them Both” abortion amendment to the state constitution.
