Former college soccer player Karenna Groff and members of her family are among the six people killed in an upstate New York plane crash on April 12.
Groff was a former MIT soccer player who was named the 2022 NCAA woman of the year. She was on board the aircraft with her family, according to a family statement provided to the Associated Press.
The FAA said late Saturday that a Mitsubishi MU-2B crashed in a field near Copake, New York, around noon when it was heading to Columbia County Airport in Hudson, New York. There were six people on board heading to a family holiday celebration, Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters in a briefing on Sunday.
Among the other victims were Groff’s father, neuroscientist Dr. Michael Ghent, her mother, urogynecologist Dr. Joy Saini, her boyfriend, James Santoro, her brother, paralegal Jared Groff, and her brother’s partner, Alexia Couyutas Duarte, according to the family statement shared with the AP.
“They were a wonderful family,” James Santoro’s father, John Santoro, told the AP. “The world lost a lot of very good people who were going to do a lot of good for the world if they had the opportunity. We’re all personally devastated.”
The pilot reported a “missed approach” and was attempting a second landing when the aircraft crashed into a flat field and “compressed, buckled and embedded into the terrain,” Inman said at Sunday’s briefing.
Video footage of the incident appeared to show that the aircraft was intact as it descended and “crashed at a high rate of descent into the ground,” Inman said. He did not share which person had been piloting the plane, but told reporters that the man helming the aircraft was a certified pilot who had “been flying for a number of years.”
There was no distress call prior to the crash, according to Inman, and all six passengers on board were moved from the scene. None were hospitalized.
“Our mission is to understand not just what happened, but why it happened, and to provide recommendations for it not to happen again,” he said. “We will not be (determining) the probable cause while we’re here on scene, nor will we speculate about what may have caused this accident.”
He said he expected a preliminary report on the investigation to be completed within 30 days, and a full investigative report to be finished in 12 to 24 months.