DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Shawn Anderson usually keeps a routine.
The musician moonlights as a Lyft driver, and usually shuttles passengers from here to there across Atlanta until the wee hours of the morning. So, it's usually late in the morning when he wakes up to get started with his day.
But on Wednesday, something was different, and a split-second decision likely saved his life entirely.
"In a daze right now ... just trying to figure things out," he told 11Alive over the phone.
On this morning, Anderson said his routine derailed a bit when he woke up too early to start his day, and he couldn't go back to sleep.
"So, I figured I would take a shower and just try to go back to sleep and get ready to go to work for 3 or 4 today at the restaurant, or I would get up and go run some errands and then come back and maybe do a jog or something," he recounted.
He chose the latter, and decided to run the errands. It wasn't until he returned to his DeKalb County townhome on Peachwood Circle, that he understood how consequential that simple choice was.
"Once I came back, I thought that maybe there was an active shooting or something," he recalled of the large police presence. "I knew it was a crime scene or something."
That something turned out to be more catastrophic. Authorities say a small plane with two people on board had fallen from the air just after takeoff from the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. It crashed into Anderson's upstairs bathroom.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the crash happened around 10:32 a.m.
Anderson left his house at 10:17 a.m. - just 15 minutes before.
"I guess I just went against my normal routine," he said.
That choice to run errands first, and delay taking that shower, meant that he wasn't home when the Piper PA-28 smashed into the bathroom.
"If I were to have taken a shower during that time, I would have been in the shower - it pretty much destroyed the upstairs bathroom," he recalled. "You can basically see inside the house - the bathroom upstairs wall is gone. The shower - everything is gone."
The NTSB is still at the scene investigating what caused the plane to crash, killing both its occupants. But for Anderson, the weight of what happened is still clear.
"For the two people on the plane - it's heartbreaking, you know. I hate to hear something like that. It's very sad," he said. "It just makes you put everything in perspective. Because I could lose everything I have but, you know, two people lost their lives, and I'm still here."
As for what's next for him, Anderson said all that's left to do is rebuild. Start over.
Aftermath of DeKalb plane crash
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