Elaine Julian, a Moline resident, said she was at a town park with her 4-year-old twin great-grandsons when she heard the jets fly overhead around 2:20 p.m.

“I said, ‘Come on and let’s see if we can find the jets,’ ” Julian said. “So we were looking up at the sky and we saw some puffs of smoke, and we could see that there was an airplane in one of those puffs and it was kind of zig-zagging and looked like it was having some trouble.”

The plane descended toward the ground soon after, emitting a large ball of fire, Julian said.

“Probably a couple more seconds after that, the noise stopped,” she said. “It went behind a tree so we couldn’t see it as it hit (the ground), but we heard a loud boom.”

Julian and her grandchildren arrived back at her home in Moline just before 3 p.m. Monday, which she said was just in time to see a piece of aircraft debris fall in her yard.