NPR host Adrian Ma remembers his girlfriend who died in D.C. plane crash
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.”
Transcript:
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
I knew someone on AA 5342. That is the subject line of an email that my colleague, Adrian Ma, sent to some of the leaders here at NPR the morning after the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Potomac River last month after a midair collision. The person that Adrian knew was his girlfriend, Kiah Duggins. In his email, he offered to talk. Adrian took some time away. He is on the line with me now. Hi, my friend.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Hey. I want to say on behalf of the newsroom, we are so very sorry.
MA: (Crying) Well, I guess I didn’t expect the waterworks to start this soon, but thank you.
KELLY: I want people listening to know what you and I know, which is we do a job where it often falls to us to call people on what may be the worst day of their life, the worst month of their life. And I know every time, I feel awful asking questions, but I do because people so often want to tell the story. They want people…
MA: Yeah.
KELLY: …To know the person they have lost. They want us, as journalists, to bear witness. So that’s why you and I are talking today, and it also means I want to let you take a little bit of the lead here. Do you want to share some of how you learned of the crash, what happened that night?
MA: So I went to the airport on Wednesday night to pick her up. And I pull up in the curb area outside Reagan, and I’m expecting a text or a phone call from her. Didn’t get one. So I wait a little bit. And as I’m waiting, one of the things that I notice is that emergency vehicles start whizzing by, like, a strange amount of emergency vehicles – just like, (imitating sirens). And I sort of take note of it but don’t really know what to make of it.
KELLY: Eventually, Adrian parked, went inside the airport and spoke to airline employees. No one could give him an answer about what was going on. He first learned about the crash when one of Kiah’s friends called him.
MA: And she says, I think you were 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, like, my stomach drops. And I start looking on the web for stories. I see, among the sort of rolling news coverage, there’s a story about how four survivors have been recovered from the plane. And in my mind, I’m thinking, well, I hope there was only four people on that plane.
KELLY: Adrian and other people there to pick up family and friends were taken to a lounge, where it quickly became clear that there were more than four people on the plane.
MA: For the next three hours or so, it’s really quiet in that room. Outside the windows of this lounge, you can see the crash site. You can see this line of emergency vehicles along the banks of the Potomac with their sirens flashing.
KELLY: 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.
MA: 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 says something like, we haven’t found any survivors yet. And people in the room just lose it. People are crying, and they’re breaking down. I’m breaking down because it’s becoming increasingly real. And after that, I get on the phone with Kiah’s parents and have to tell them that everything they’ve been reading in the news is what they’re telling us. You know, we don’t have any better news to share. And that was incredibly tough.
KELLY: And then the days after the crash, would you tell me a little bit about kind of how those have unfurled, how you’ve been trying to make your way through this?
MA: I don’t know if this sounds dramatic, but basically, it felt like being in emotional hell. In the week after the crash, I probably cried more in that week than I had in decades of being alive. And coming home was really hard. You know, 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 I want to say, like, hey, check this out. And then I realize I can’t do that anymore. So it’s just been, like, a new level of pain that I didn’t know that I could experience.
KELLY: Well, so tell me about Kiah.
MA: Yeah. So Kiah, for the last few years, has worked as a civil rights lawyer. She was about to start a job as a professor at Howard University School of Law basically helping to shape the next generation of Black civil rights lawyers. It was, for her, a dream job. That was sort of her professional side. I think personality wise, a friend of Kiah said it best, that Kiah is like sunshine personified.
KELLY: Yeah.
MA: Yeah, she had this contagious energy. And she loved to ask you, what was a magical moment from your day? And she was also the kind of person who knew all the words to all the Disney musicals, especially – her favorite was the Brandy version of “Cinderella.”
KELLY: (Laughter) Right.
MA: Yeah. And so I think Kiah was a person who was really committed to making the world a better place and just as committed to experiencing and spreading joy. And it’s the combination of those two things that I think is one of the many reasons that I fell in love with her.
KELLY: Is there, like, a story that you want to make sure we all know about her, about who she was, how she lived her life?
MA: So Kiah really loved to travel. She’s been to dozens of countries. But one place she kept going back to is Disney World. And, you know, she invited me to go to Disney World with her, and I hadn’t been to Disney World. I had no interest, really, in going (laughter). But with her, it was really, really, really fun. And I think, generally, one of my takeaways from that was – well, at first, just not understanding, like, Kiah, like, you have this busy, stressful job. How do you make time for all these trips? And she said to me, there’s no good time to schedule fun, so you just got to commit to it. And that’s one of those things that is going to be in my brain forever.
(SOUNDBITE OF HOT SUGAR’S “L’ENFER C’EST LES AUTRES”)
KELLY: That’s my colleague, Adrian Ma. He hosts the Planet Money Indicator podcast. Adrian, again, I’m so sorry for your loss. And it has been an honor to help you honor and remember your girlfriend, Kiah Duggins. Thank you.
MA: Thank you, Mary Louise.
(SOUNDBITE OF HOT SUGAR’S “L’ENFER C’EST LES AUTRES”)
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