Mother of D.C. Plane Crash Victim Reflects on Daughter’s Legacy (Exclusive)

On the night of Jan. 29, Kiah Duggins was making her way back to Washington, D.C., after a visit to her midwestern hometown, a trip she’d taken plenty of times before. But this visit was different — she’d come to support her mother through surgery. It was also the last time her family saw the 30-year-old civil rights attorney alive.

Duggins was one of 67 people killed when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed into an American Airlines plane en route to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The mid-air collision sent both aircraft hurtling into the Potomac River and left no survivors, becoming the deadliest airline crash in the country since 2001.

Duggins, who would have rung in her 31st birthday on Tuesday, Sept. 16, was visiting Wichita because her mother Gwen had a double mastectomy two days before the plane crash.

“She came to Wichita, really, to support me,” Gwen tells PEOPLE nearly a year later. “I had been diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time.”

Though the mother daughter duo lived more than a thousand miles apart, they spoke on the phone nearly every day.

“I told her, ‘You’re busy, it’s okay’ and she’s like, ‘Mom, I’m absolutely going to be there,’ ” Gwen recalls of her daughter’s insistence. Hours after she was released from the hospital, Kiah boarded her flight bound for the nation’s capital, but never made it home.

The woman who had dropped everything that week to show up for her family had been partial to defending those who needed her since she was a girl, her mother says, recalling a common refrain in their household as Kiah and her siblings Aisha and Donovan grew up — a Bible verse from Luke 12:48, which reads, “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required.”

“Every day, when I’d drop them off at school, I would say, ‘Remember – to whom much is given.” And they would say, ‘We know mom, much is required,’ ” Gwen recalls with a laugh.

But Kiah really took that sentiment to heart. “Even in elementary school, she would take up for the kids that other kids bullied,” Gwen says.

As a teenager, Kiah watched on television as Michelle Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention one summer. She was immediately spellbound and later told her family she wanted to intern for her someday.

Gwen recalls chuckling with Kiah’s father about their little girl with big dreams, but a few years — and a couple of attempts later — Kiah made it happen. Still in college, she interned for the White House’s Let Girls Learn initiative, which aimed to help teenage girls obtain a quality education.

After the crash, the Obamas reached out to the Duggins family.

“Barack and I were heartbroken to learn about Kiah’s passing,” the Obamas wrote in a letter to the family that was shared with PEOPLE.

“It didn’t take much to realize how special she was,” they wrote of her internship. “Kiah went above and beyond on every task. At every Let Girls Learn meeting, she was the first to show up and the last to leave. When high school students visited, she was quick to offer a word of wisdom or encouragement.”

When the family’s pastor asked the congregation to pick one word to focus on this year, Gwen chose “light,” a theme she was shocked to find reflected in the Obamas’ letter.

“Scripture tells us, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’ In the days ahead, we know Kiah’s light will continue to shine – giving us strength and showing the way,” the Obamas wrote.

The entire Duggins family once stayed connected across the miles through a group chat. Now, Gwen says her daughter’s absence has left an unfillable hole, upending their family’s dynamic.

“When we are together, it is loud, it is effervescent, it is rambunctious,” she says of their tight-knit family. “It’s just hard.”

Gwen, who has clung to her faith, admits it’s the human condition in the face of loss to question the hand life has dealt. “Why me or why her? Why did she have to die? And those are answers that I don’t think I will get on this side of heaven,” she says.

Kiah’s family now hopes to continue her legacy through an organization their daughter started during college to help other young women: Kiah’s Princess Project.

“When I was a little girl, I really, really wanted to be a princess,” Kiah, also a former Miss Kansas contestant, explained in a 2017 TEDx Talk about a college readiness program supporting underrepresented young women that she launched at 20 years old.

During the remarks, she recalled a childhood moment when a friend on a playdate told her she couldn’t be one because Black princesses didn’t exist. Her “royal dreams were reignited” in part by Brandy Norwood‘s titular role in a 1997 interpretation of Cinderella, but still, she noticed she was sometimes the only Black person in the accelerated program classes at her high school.

She began the program by giving high school students college folders, containing scholarship spreadsheets, recommendation letter request forms, standardized testing study tips and more. “They’re basically social capital in a folder,” Kiah explained during the 2017 speech.

She envisioned a diverse group of women mentoring the girls to create a “physical validation of the girls’ college dreams and show them in real life that their dreams of going to college were valid and that they were not that far out of their reach.”

Gwen says Kiah participated in Miss Kansas pageants to try to spread the word about her nonprofit.

After earning her undergraduate degree at Wichita State University and teaching English in Taiwan as a Fulbright Scholar, Kiah attended Harvard Law School. It was there, Gwen says, that Kiah worked to try to rename an on-campus lounge space “Belinda Hall,” in honor of Belinda Sutton, an enslaved woman who was owned by the Royall family, which helped establish the university’s law school.

“Going to Harvard sharpened her vision of who she was, and sharpened her vision of how she felt like the world should be,” Gwen says.

After graduating from law school, Kiah moved to D.C. to work for a non-profit called Civil Rights Corps, where she litigated cases in Tennessee, Texas and the nation’s capital.

Before she died, Kiah supported her father, Maurice, a physician, as he applied for a new job as chief medical officer of a hospital and underwent several rounds of interviews. He found out he’d gotten the job after the crash. In the midst of overwhelming loss, he wasn’t sure if it was still the right move. Ultimately, he accepted, Gwen says.

“He chose the job as a way to move forward and to use the encouragement that she had for him to help him continue to move forward and to not stay paralyzed by his grief,” she says.

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Kiah herself also had a new career venture lined up, one that seemed a natural combination of her professional skills and personal goals.

This fall, she was set to begin a new role as an assistant law professor at Howard University, a historically Black private school in D.C.

“She was a big picture person,” Gwen says of Kiah’s desire to make the academic and professional journey easier for those coming up behind her. “I think she had a vision for the future of how civil rights and protecting and speaking for other people’s rights could truly change this country. And the more people you get, then it multiplies that opportunity.”

As Kiah herself said in her TEDx Talk, “We can help solve the world’s big problems by sharing our own little gifts.”