Asra Hussain Raza, daughter of Indian immigrants was among the victims of the DC air collision Wednesday night that claimed the lives of all 67 people on board the American Airlines regional jet and U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter.
The midair collision that has left a heartbreaking trail of mourning families in its wake will be remembered as the deadliest aviation disaster in the U.S. since 2001.
A Washington, DC-based consultant, Asra Hussain, 26, traveled to Wichita, Kansas, twice a month to work on a turnaround project for a hospital there, her family told news outlets.
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She graduated with honors in 2020 from Indiana University and married her college sweetheart Hamaad Raza, who was a graduate of the IU Kelley School of Business in August 2023. The heartbroken husband said his wife texted him that she was landing minutes before the collision. He found out it was his wife’s plane through social media.
Hamaad Raza remembered his wife as the “kindest person I’ve ever met” who went “above and beyond and then took a giant leap over that when it came to doing things for other people, for me, for her parents, for my parents,” Raza told NBC 4 Washington.
The couple met while in college in Indiana and were only married for two years. Raza received a text message from Asra Hussain as he was heading to Reagan National Airport Wednesday night to pick her up.
“We’re landing in 20 minutes,” her text read. However, while waiting for Asra Hussain, Raza noticed first responders racing toward the Potomac River.
“I was waiting and I started seeing a bunch of EMS vehicles speeding past me, like way too many than normal,” he told the outlet. Raza’s worries were amplified when he realized the texts he sent to his wife “weren’t going through.”
He reached Terminal 2 at the DC airport and said he witnessed hundreds of emergency workers around the airport responding to the collision. Raza then went on social media to look for answers.
“I show up to the airport, and my wife’s not responding, and I look on Twitter and I see that it’s her flight,” the grieving husband told the outlet. He told WUSA that he was “praying” his wife was safe and showed the undelivered messages on his phone screen.
A day later, he said it was “crazy” to realize his wife’s plane was involved in the fatal collision. “It’s just, feels crazy that it happened to us, to be honest,” he told NBC 4 Washington. “I mean, it’s like you see these things happen in the news, you see them happen in other countries.”
Now, as he prepares to plan his wife’s funeral, he said the experience has shown him how fragile life can be. “Life is short. Hug your loved ones.” Raza heartbreakingly said. “Tell them you love them when they’re getting on a flight. Check up on them. Text your family when you land.”
“I always pick her up from departures. I always help her load the bag into the car and give her a big hug and a kiss and then off we go. I had dinner waiting at home,” Hamaad Raza told NBC Nightly News. “My wife was such a giver. She gave and she gave and she gave, almost to the point of where she didn’t think about herself enough.”
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“She was a beautiful woman, brilliant, always smiling, artistic, academically brilliant. She was a really good person. I was honored to be her father-in-law for two years,” her father in law Hashim Raza told 13News. She would often call him at the end of his late emergency room shifts to make sure he stayed awake on the drive home, he told CNN.
As officials scramble to determine the cause of the crash, the catastrophe is drawing new attention to long-standing safety warnings about the increasingly busy airspace above the nation’s capital. .A preliminary report will be ready in about 30 days, the National TransportationSafety Board said.