The brown teddy bear smelled like oil and jet fuel.
It was tucked inside the pink backpack of 11-year-old Alydia Livingston, along with her headphones, journal and a pencil topped with a rubber unicorn. The backpack and its contents came home to her grandparents in Richmond. Alydia didn’t.
The girl, her 14-year-old sister, Everly, and parents Donna and Peter were aboard American Eagle Flight 5342, the plane clipped by an Army helicopter over the Potomac River as it prepared to land at Reagan National Airport. No one in either aircraft survived.
In the weeks and months after the crash that killed 67 people, small personal treasures retrieved from the water would find their way to the places where they held meaning. A man’s wedding ring discovered as a diver sifted through sand at the bottom of the river. A phone that still worked, showing Asra Hussain’s last moments were spent planning a dinner party for her friends. A note Jesse Pitcher’s wife slipped into his suitcase like she did like every time he went away, this one encouraging him to stay safe on his hunting trip.
And the bear, the one Alydia named Brown Teddy that rarely left her side. When schools shuttered during the pandemic, Alydia’s grandmother, Martha Livingston, would include Brown Teddy in their reading lessons to keep the restless kindergartner engaged. When Alydia and her sister continued virtual school so they could travel to New Jersey each week to practice figure skating, Brown Teddy made every trip.
Days after the crash, Martha and her husband, Chris, were asked if there was anything special they hoped the divers might find.
“I know there were other things I probably should have asked for, but I wanted Brown Teddy. We had to get Brown Teddy,” Martha said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this month. “To get Brown Teddy back, to me, it was my connection to them.”
A year after the crash, the grief still comes in waves. On the eve of the anniversary, families linked by the tragedy gathered at D.A.R. Constitution Hall in D.C. to honor the strangers who stepped in to help them carry the sudden and lingering sorrow: the hotel employee who in the days after the crash offered families a warm drink and a listening ear; the mortician who has called a man’s parents nearly every week to check on them; the scuba divers who returned day after day to the frigid water in search of items that might give people some small measure of comfort.
The Post interviewed a dozen family members, first responders and city officials, some speaking publicly for the first time, about the moments immediately after the disaster, the months-long recovery effort and the enduring toll it took on them.
First responders said they’re still haunted by what they saw in the river. One diver said in his 13 years of law enforcement, he’d never been confronted with the death of a child. Not long after the crash, he found a small ice skate, its meaning unmistakable.
No survivors
D.C. police officer Tim Ochsenschlager was sitting at the front desk of Harbor Patrol at 8:48 p.m. on Jan. 29, 2025, when the red phone rang. He picked up the direct line to National Airport and heard a commotion in the air traffic control tower, then: “Crash, crash, crash. This is Alert 3. Crash, crash, crash.”
Moments later, a 911 dispatcher called — someone had reported “a fireball over the Potomac” had fallen into the water.
More than 300 first responders from the D.C. region and as far away as Baltimore and the Eastern Shore would race to the scene.
Ochsenschlager, a trained scuba diver, made a flurry of calls dispatching an airboat to navigate the icy waters and summoning his colleagues. His boat soon met up with another that had tied off to the airplane wing protruding from the water. A sheen of oil danced on the water’s surface, illuminated by the flashing emergency lights of ambulances and fire trucks stationed on the runway.
“Everybody quietly knew that it was something we had never witnessed before,” said D.C. police diver Robert Varga, a 16-year veteran.
“I can still feel it in the back of my throat, the smell of jet fuel,” said Ochsenschlager.
As they worked, alerts began to pop up on their iPhones reading “AirTag Found Moving With You” from the trackers some victims had attached to their luggage. Those notifications reminded Ochsenschlager of how close the passengers had been to a safe landing, of how some family members were probably already waiting at the airport.
There would be no survivors. That was clear almost from the start, said D.C. Fire and EMS Chief John A. Donnelly Sr. In an interview with The Post earlier this month, he described a meeting held at the one-hour mark of the rescue operation where commanders confronted that grim truth. There, he said, they redefined who the first responders were there to serve.
“Who are our victims now? We don’t have anybody to save from the plane or the helicopter; it was the families of those people,” Donnelly said. “We needed to make sure that we supported the families and got them reunited with their loved ones. That was number one.”
‘Some form of closure’
Pulling bodies from the water was the first difficult task. Identifying them was the next. The medical examiner’s office relied on fingerprints, dental records for young children, DNA.
D.C. police detectives then individually notified each family.
In the days after the crash, Donnelly and other officials visited the hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, where the Red Cross had arranged for victim’s families to stay. Meanwhile, the International Association of Fire Fighters set up a peer support hub near the river. In those first few days, IAFF General President Edward Kelly said nearly 75 percent of the first responders stopped by to speak with counselors.
Meetings with the families lasted hours, Donnelly said, and he learned that the kindest thing he could was be direct. But as blunt as he needed to be in delivering the devastating news, he was determined to speak just as plainly in his promises.
When families asked if everyone in the river would be found, Donnelly said some federal agencies encouraged him not to make any promises. He didn’t listen.
“I was like, ‘No, I am sure,’ ” he said. “ ‘Knowing the people involved, we will recover your loved ones. Nobody is going to be lost.’ I knew it was a risk. But I also knew it was important to say.”
By Feb. 4, six days after the crash, officials announced they had recovered the remains of the 67 passengers and crew members. By the next day, they had identified them all.
“There was nothing more important to us,” said Lindsey Appiah, D.C.’s deputy mayor for public safety and justice, of recovering all 67 victims. “And I just said that so emphatically, and I’m almost emotional — everything that we did, everything, was to ensure that families could have some form of closure in a very awful, shocking, difficult situation.”
Divers continued to scour the river for months, bringing up whatever they could find for family members to claim.
D.C. Chief Medical Examiner Francisco Diaz called the process a kind of “choreography” — one he grew familiar with during a career in which he’s completed more than 10,000 autopsies. But the plane crash felt heavier, he said.
Scientifically, it went off without a hitch, as the medical examiner’s office was already set up to handle a mass casualty event while preparing for three national security events earlier that month: the electoral vote certification, the funeral of former president Jimmy Carter and the presidential inauguration.
“The role of the medical examiner is to be emotionally removed because otherwise, how can you do cases,” Diaz said. “This was different because the interaction with the families was very intense. The medical examiner cannot bring anybody back to life, all you can do is provide a little respite.”
Diaz spent hours at the hotel with the families answering their questions: How do we choose a funeral home? Who is the legal next of kin? Can we have an open casket?
After one meeting, Diaz said a woman approached him. “Can I touch you?” she asked. “You were the last person to touch my son.”
‘The year of firsts’
As much of the country braced for the winter storm last week, Kylie Pitcher thought of her husband. She had never salted their driveway, learned how to work a generator or scraped the ice off of their cars — Jesse always had it handled. Of course she missed him on the holidays, the anniversaries and the birthdays. But it was the mundane moments like these that hit her hardest.
As she readied the Calvert County, Maryland, home for snow, she realized it had been exactly a year since she’d zipped that note in his carry-on and kissed him goodbye.
“It’s the year of the firsts,” she said.
It’s a pain that has radiated outward from the Potomac, touching every family that lost someone.
Matt Collins’s fingers itched to text his brother, Chris, when the New England Patriots won the AFC title. And Hamaad Raza, who had met Asra Hussain when they were both students at Indiana University, couldn’t help but think of the party his Indiana-native wife would have hosted to watch the Hoosiers football team become national champions.
Martha and Chris Livingston were determined to carry on their annual tradition of making a book for their grandchildren. They compile photos and collect stories written by each of the six. But this year, two are gone.
Everly’s eighth-grade English teacher passed along one of the stories she had written shortly before her death. But for Alydia, Martha decided to write the story of the crash from the perspective of her granddaughter’s closest companion: Brown Teddy.
The girls’ cousins and friends still struggled to comprehend what had happened. Who better, the grandparents thought, to gently explain than the stuffed bear?
The story begins as Alydia gets on her flight and places Brown Teddy into her pink backpack alongside the journal and pencil, and asks the bear to consider what they should write about their adventure to the U.S. Figure Skating National Development Camp. Alydia and Everly spend the flight gushing about the experience.
They hear a “BOOM!” and are enveloped in a “great flash of light.”
“The plane splashed into the water quickly soaking my stuffing through and through,” the story reads. “I floated and floated for what seemed like days until a diver grabbed the straps of the backpack and pulled me up, up, up to the top!”
As the story ends, Brown Teddy sends his brother bear to comfort Alydia’s best friend.
Brown Teddy misses Alydia but knows the Livingston family is up in heaven, sparkling “like the sequins on a fancy skating dress.”
The bear, Alydia’s grandmother writes, is “joyful and sorrowful at the same time.”
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