MIDDLETOWN – Middletown Andy Beyer High School recently marked one year since the “worst day of my life.”
His wife Justyna and 12-year-old daughter Brielle were killed on January 29, 2025, when the plane they were in crashed over the Potomac River near Washington, DC.
“We miss them terribly,” he said Monday from his daughter’s room in Virginia, where he himself goes to “earth.” “We try to live life the way they want.”
Brielle would have turned 14 on January 18.
Beyer, whose parents still live in Middletown, moved to Virginia after graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003.
The incident involved a US Army Black Hawk helicopter built by Connecticut-based Sikorsky and an airliner near Ronald Reagan National Airport.
Flight 5342 was carrying four crew members and 60 passengers, including U.S. figure skaters, coaches and family members. The helicopter had three people on board.
Brielle was an excellent ice skater, her father said. She and her mother were returning from Wichita, Kansas, where she competed at the National High Performance Development Camp.
It was “the dream of her life, the highest level of advancement in the country for the level of figure skating she was at,” Beyer added.
That day, he and his now 7-year-old son, Kallen, were waiting in the parking lot near the airport, expecting the plane to land around 9 p.m. It was freezing outside, he recalled.
His wife texted him three minutes before the crash to say they were about to land.
His subsequent messages didn’t go through, Beyer explained, so they headed inside. Soon after, he saw “parades of fire trucks and flashing emergency lights. My heart sank a little.”
Beyer’s neighbor, an air traffic controller, wasn’t working that night, but he called her.
“She confirmed that their plane was involved in an accident,” he said.
He then told Kallen that they were both dead.
“We cried together for 20 minutes,” he said. “I brought him to the front seat and just held him. I started to shut down and go into shock.”
D.C. homicide detectives were at the baggage drop-off, along with family members of the victims, he continued.
“That’s how I figured it all out,” Beyer said. “It was a really, really awful night.”
Justyna Beyer worked as a nurse in a Fairfax hospital emergency room. Beyer is a computer programmer.
It is not the first time that the family goes through very difficult times. At six months, Brielle was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nerve cells.
She underwent surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City that lasted more than seven hours and was put on a ventilator in the ICU, Beyer said.
“There was a residual tumor that they couldn’t cut out completely because it was attached to her spine,” he said, adding that she was resilient throughout her cancer treatment.
Brielle was left with nerve damage from the surgery, he added.
“The fact that she became what she was in figure skating is just a testament to how resilient and determined she was,” he said. “As a child, she was bright, bubbly and precocious.”
She was very advanced for her age, Beyer said.
“By age 1, she had over 100 words by her first birthday,” he said. “She was reading chapter books by the time she was almost 4. She was just exceptional in school.”
Brielle had “maturity well beyond her years,” he said. “Just a month before she died, she was telling me what kind of mother she wanted to be.”
Last July would have been the couple’s 15th wedding anniversary, Beyer said.
“She was incredibly strong and resilient,” he said of his wife. “When I went through the cancer journey with Brielle, I really knew what was important in life.”
Both made sure their children felt loved at all times, he said.
“We both sacrificed a lot to participate in elite figure skating,” he said. “That takes a lot of family: financially, time, emotionally, all of it, and she’s been a constant, supportive presence as part of it. We both knew what we were giving up.”
Beyer and Kallen have received tremendous support from family, friends, the school community and others, he said.
“He needs continuity in things like play dates, so a lot of people have stepped in on that,” Beyer said. “In this aspect it thrives.”
Kallen “has really high feelings at school” because she “has to focus,” Beyer explained. Keeping his routine was very helpful.
“When you’re trying to calm down your physical movement and everything, that’s when the pain can really come to the surface,” Beyer said. “He had a lot of challenges. It was really traumatic for him.”
Every night, father and son look at photos and watch videos of happier times.
“We try to remember them and talk about how we feel,” Beyer said. “These are just some of the ways we’ve dealt with it.”
Beyer has a tattoo of his wife’s initials, which he used in his signature, and a picture of Brielle on his forearm, based on a photo of her doing the very difficult Biellmann spin, in which a skater spins on a blade while holding her other leg above her head.
“She looks almost exactly like her,” he said.
The family visited the airport Thursday, spent some time reflecting, then took an emotional riverboat ride to the crash site, Beyer said.
“It was really meaningful,” he said. “It was also really hard. I’m glad I did it.”
In the meantime, life goes on, Beyer said.
“They left us one thing,” he said. “They left a legacy of love on me and Kallen intends to continue.”
This article was originally published at ‘They left a legacy of love’: Connecticut native reflects after plane crash kills wife and daughter.