Dead Celebrity Alert

Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) — Michael Klein, the owner of California hedge-fund firm Pacificor LLC, his teenage daughter, Talia, and a pilot died after their private plane crashed near Panama’s tallest mountain.

Francesca Lewis, the 12-year-old friend of Klein’s daughter, who was 13, survived and is in the hospital with multiple injuries…

Lewis was found walking less than a kilometer from the site of the crash, 7,536 feet up on the eastern side of Volcan Baru, de la Hoz said. She was taken to a private clinic in David, Panama’s third-largest city, where she will meet her parents, he said. …

The hedge-fund manager started MIBEK Corp., a developer of financial-analysis software, in 1989 and sold the company in 1992. He then founded software company Transoft Networks Inc., which Hewlett-Packard Co. bought in 1999, according to the Pacificor Web site.

He subsequently became president and chief executive officer of eGroups Inc., the world’s largest group e-mail communication service. Yahoo! Inc. acquired that company for $450 million in 2000, Pacificor’s Web site says. … Read full obituary

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