A Kansas City Chiefs super fan who died in the horror plane crash in Washington DC had pledged to be back home in time for the Super Bowl.
Dustin Miller, 44, had waited his entire life to watch his beloved team try to win a third-in-a-row Super Bowl.
‘His words to my mom when she dropped him off at the airport on Wednesday were, ‘I’ll call you when I land. I’m going to try to make it back in time for the Super Bowl,” his sister Kristen Miller-Zahn said.
Miller had even bought a plane ticket for his brother Jon to fly to Kansas so they could watch the game as a family, according to a GoFundMe.
The Kansas native and IT professional was on his way to Rochester, New York, via Washington DC for work when tragedy struck.
‘Shortly before the plane departed from Wichita, Dustin texted his boss and spoke with a friend, describing the celebratory mood among the crew and fellow passengers since it was the last flight of the day,’ the GoFundMe said.
‘He also mentioned how cool it was that US and Russian figure skaters were on board.’
Miller never made it back home. He was one of 67 killed when the passenger jet and an Army helicopter collided in the air.
His family will now watch Sunday’s game in his honor, they said. ‘Dustin was the funniest guy in the room,’ Miller’s family said in a statement.
‘He was also the most generous and loving. He had a way of making people feel at home in his presence.’
The remains of all 67 victims of last week’s midair collision of an American Airlines flight and an Army helicopter near the nation’s capital have been recovered, authorities said Tuesday. All but one has been identified.
On Tuesday, crews working in choppy conditions raised a number of large pieces of the jetliner from the Potomac River, including the right wing, the center fuselage and parts of the forward cabin, cockpit, tail cone and rudder.
The chief medical examiner will be working to positively identify the final set of remains, officials said.
The collision occurred last Wednesday night as the plane was about to land at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing everyone on board both aircraft.
Authorities said early on that they expected to recover the remains of everyone who died, and they are now focusing on retrieving the jet and hope to recover the helicopter later this week.
On Monday salvage crews were able to pull one of the two jet engines from the river, along with large pieces of the plane’s exterior, Col. Francis B. Pera of the Army Corps of Engineers said.
Sixty passengers and four crew were on the American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas, including figure skaters returning from the 2025 U.S. Figure Skating Championships there.
The Black Hawk was on a training mission. Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Georgia; Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland; and Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, of Durham, North Carolina, were aboard.
Federal investigators are trying to piece together the events that led to the collision. Full investigations typically take a year or more, but they hope to have a preliminary report within 30 days.
Wednesday’s crash was the deadliest in the U.S. since Nov. 12, 2001, when a jet slammed into a New York City neighborhood just after takeoff, killing all 260 people on board and five on the ground.
