(CNN) -- The two people who died Thursday night when their helicopter crashed into a mountain in the Dominican Republic were friends who had left their homes and family in Florida this week to help deliver aid to the people of Haiti, a son of one of the victims said Friday.
The accident occurred about 7 p.m. in Dajabon, just east of the border with Haiti, said Rosani Zapata, a spokeswoman for the Dominican Civil Aviation Institute.
The helicopter had filed a flight plan from Santiago to Jimani in the Dominican Republic, then on to Port-au-Prince in Haiti. It was en route back to Santiago when the crash occurred, she said.
Aboard were pilot John Ward of Fort Myers, Florida, and James Jalovec, a 53-year-old Naples, Florida, businessman who owned Sweetwater Environmental Inc., a sewage company based in Sebring.
Mark Jalovec, 21, told CNN in a telephone interview that his father began discussing the prospect of helping out a couple of days after the January 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti.
"It kind of caught everybody off guard," he said, noting that his father had never done anything similar. Still, he said, his father saw a fit. "I got a helicopter; these people are in desperate need -- he kind of decided it with Mr. Ward that they were going to do it, and that's what they did."
He said his father last called him Monday, after he and Ward had flown doctors from an orphanage outside Port-au-Prince to theDominican Republic.