 A turnover of this top leadership took place on January 14, 1936, however, when Dyess and his top lieutenant, chief accountant and finance director Robert H. McNair, Jr., were killed in an airplane crash returning to Arkansas from Washington, DC.After his death, leadership of the Dyess Colony passed to Little Rock attorney and Arkansas Department of Labor statistician Floyd Sharp, a personal friend of Dyess, and Lawrence Westbrook, a Texas rancher who had been recruited by Harry Hopkins to work at FERA.Westbrook was fired by Hopkins in 1937 for a highly absentee work ethic and for attempting to imperially micromanage the colony's affairs from his desk in Washington.