In the wee hours of the morning on January 30, after an American Airlines flight collided with a military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and crashed into the Potomac River, NPR's Adrian Ma sent an email to some of the leaders at NPR. Its subject line read:
"I knew someone on AA5342."
That someone was Adrian's girlfriend, Kiah Duggins. She was coming back from Wichita, Kan., where she was visiting a family member who had just had surgery. There were no survivors. Adrian offered to speak to NPR, about that night and about his late girlfriend.
Remembering the night of the crash
That night, Adrian arrived at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport a little before 9 p.m. to pick up Kiah. He was expecting a text or a call when she landed, but none came. And while he waited, he noted a strangely large number of emergency vehicles whizzing by, sirens blaring — he says he just didn't know what to make of them.
Eventually, Adrian parked and walked into the terminal. The arrival board didn't show Kiah's flight number, so he approached an employee at the American Airlines counter. When he asked about AA5432, "the person at the counter just sort of gives me, like, a blank expression." Nobody would give him a straight response.
At this point, Adrian got a phone call from one of Kiah's friends. "She says, 'I think you're supposed to pick Kiah up at the airport tonight. Do you know what flight she was on?' And I tell her the number and she starts breathing faster. And she says, 'Well, I'm seeing this thing on the internet about a crash near the airport.'
"And my stomach drops."
Adrian began doing his own searching on social media and mainstream news outlets. Amidst the coverage, he saw a story about four survivors being recovered. "And in my mind, I'm thinking, 'Well, I hope there were only four people on that plane.'"
At that point, Adrian and all the other people at the airport to pick up family and friends were taken to a lounge area.
"There's somebody standing there with a passenger manifest, and they ask, 'Who are you here for?' I say, 'Kiah Duggins' and they take their finger and start tracing the list of names on this piece of paper, and they flip the paper, and they trace their finger down the page one more time, and they flip the paper again. And that's when I realize there's a lot more people than just four people on this flight."
Outside the windows of the lounge, he could see a line of emergency vehicles along the banks of the Potomac with their sirens flashing.
"For the next three hours or so, it's really quiet in that room," he told NPR. "Except, every once in a while, somebody just sort of burst into tears."
Around 1 a.m., an official with D.C.'s homicide unit came into the room to tell the families that bodies were being recovered from the river, and there would be a process to identify them.
"And as he's talking, one woman in this group, which is probably 50 or 60 of us at this point, speaks up and says 'wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that there aren't any survivors? And the detective said something like, 'We haven't found any survivors yet.' And, you know, people in the room just lose it. They're breaking down. I'm breaking down."
All 64 people aboard the American Airlines flight and all three in the Black Hawk helicopter were killed in the collision. It was the deadliest air crash to happen in the country in two decades.
Adrian says the days and weeks since that night have "basically felt like being in emotional hell."
"There are reminders of Kiah everywhere. Her glasses are on the nightstand. Her clothes are in the closet. Little curls of her hair are scattered around. I hear echoes of her voice sometimes, especially when I see something and I want to turn to her and say, like 'hey, check this out' then I realize I can't do that anymore. So it's just been a new level of pain that I didn't know I could experience."
Kiah "was like sunshine personified"
Even though that pain is still fresh, Adrian wants to speak publicly — not just out of journalistic instinct but because, he says, talking about this has helped him get by.
"My hope is that I can sort of exorcise the pain that keeps building in my chest," he says. "I also wanted to talk about Kiah. I think the more that I can plant just a little sense of who this person was in people's minds, the more that she can live on, in a sense."
In her professional life, Kiah was a civil rights lawyer, fighting for the rights of vulnerable people and challenging abuses of power in the legal system. The day after the crash, she was supposed to have been in Boston to be part of a seminar on movement lawyering, litigating on behalf of social movements. And she was an incoming professor at Howard University School of Law, where she hoped to shape the next generation of Black civil rights lawyers — a dream job for her, Adrian says.
In her personal life, Adrian remembers her contagious energy, and the way she'd send handwritten cards to her friends for no apparent reason.
"She loved to ask you, 'What was a magical moment from your day?'"
Kiah was a self-described Disney Adult. She knew all the words to all the Disney musicals (her favorite: Brandy's Cinderella), and though she had been to dozens of countries, one of her favorite places to go for vacation was, of course, Disney World.
"She loved to say, 'I have some issues with the company, but you go there and it's just kind of awesome to get lost in this very fantastical place where everybody is kind of doing the same thing."
Adrian, meanwhile, had no interest in the theme park, but with Kiah, "it was really, really, really fun." More importantly, he remembers learning something from her on that trip that will stay with him forever. After he asked her how she made time for all her trips with her busy, stressful job, she told him, "There's no good time to schedule fun, so you just got to commit to it."
And Adrian says Kiah was just as committed to spreading and experiencing joy, as she was to making the world a better place.
"The combination of those two things is one of the many reasons that I fell in love with her."
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