Amanda Geissler, the Wisconsin woman killed in Costa Rica plane crash, remembered as fearless

Amanda Geissler had no fear.

Geissler helped lead the University of Wisconsin-Stout women's basketball team to three regional conference titles, including both years she served as team captain.

"The way you'd best describe her as a player would be scrappy," said Layne Pitt, the school's sports information director. "Everybody on the floor was taller than her, and it didn't matter. She had no fear. She would jump right in the middle of everything."

Geissler, a native of Thorp, Wis., was killed Sunday in a small plane crash in Costa Rica. All 12 people aboard, including two crew members and 10 U.S. citizens, died in the crash.

Backroads, a Berkeley, Calif.-based travel company, confirmed on Monday that Geissler was the trip leader killed in the New Year's Eve tragedy.

Mark Noll, women’s basketball coach at the University of Dubuque, said Geissler played point guard for UW-Stout when he coached there and he last saw her around Thanksgiving.

“She was home for like 18 hours, and her and her sister came to the tournament,” Noll recalled Monday. “They knew I was playing and came to watch Stout and see me.”

“Amanda was a sweetheart, a great player,” Noll said.

Geissler joined the UW-Stout team as a true freshman and played 112 games from 2003 to 2007, Pitt said.

"She was just a smile on the face all the time type of person, but when she was on the floor she was all business," Pitt said. "When we got those three championships in a row, that's the only time that's ever happened in Stout history. And she was team. She was team all the way."

Ray Cross, UW System president, added, "It is difficult to find the right words when such a young, promising life is lost. We express our deepest sorrow to all that knew Amanda.”

A family in the suburbs of New York City said five of the dead were relatives on vacation. They identified them as Bruce and Irene Steinberg and their sons Matthew, William and Zachary, all of Scarsdale.

“We are in utter shock and disbelief right now,” Bruce Steinberg’s sister, Tamara Steinberg Jacobson, wrote on Facebook.

Rabbi Jonathan Blake of the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale said in a statement posted on the temple’s Facebook page and emailed to The Associated Press that the Steinbergs were involved in philanthropy and local Jewish groups. “This tragedy hits our community very hard,” Blake wrote.

In St. Petersburg, Fla., Rabbi Jacob Luski of Congregation B’nai Israel said Monday that victims’ relatives had informed him that four members of his congregation were also on the plane.

“It is a tragedy that the Drs. Mitchell Weiss and Leslie Weiss and their two children, Hannah and Ari, died in that terrible crash,” he said. “They were a wonderful family who will be missed.”

The Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, where both the Weiss parents practiced, mourned their loss in a statement Monday.

The hospital said Mitchell Weiss was a vascular and interventional radiologist and Leslie Weiss was pediatrician.

At a news conference Sunday, Enio Cubillo, director of Costa Rica Civil Aviation, said the Nature Air charter crashed shortly after taking off just after noon Sunday from Punta Islita on a planned flight to the capital of San Jose. He said investigators were looking into possible causes.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.