An Ohio college student was coming back from her grandfather’s funeral in Kansas when she was killed in the catastrophic Washington, DC, plane crash — leaving her family struck by grief twice in one week, a campus official said Friday.
“Can you imagine losing a parent and seven days later losing a child,” Cedarville University president Thomas White said of student Grace Maxwell’s heartbroken parent.
I want us to pray for the Maxwell family. I want us to lift them up,” he told students gathered at the campus chapel.
Maxwell, 20, had just laid her grandfather, Charles Andrew Winter, to rest in her hometown of Wichita Tuesday before boarding the ill-fated flight on her way back to campus in southwestern Ohio Wednesday, her father, Dean Maxwell, told the The Wichita Eagle.
He said authorities had yet to contact him about his daughter as of Friday. “We do know she was on the plane,” he said.
Maxwell was a junior at the small Baptist college, who studied mechanical engineering and planned to develop prosthetics, friends told daytondailynews.com.
Tearful friends called her “a bright light” who had “big ideas” and was beloved in her dorm.
“We had game nights every Sunday at 5 p.m., and she was always the first person there,” friend Riley Blair told the outlet. “She could just play games with us for hours if we let her. She loved it so much, and that’s one of my favorite memories of her.”
Maxwell was also part of the school radio station and creative writing club.
She was aboard American Eagle flight 5342 when it collided with a Black Hawk helicopter Wednesday night — killing 67 people in the most deadly US plane crash in nearly a quarter century.
– With Post Wires
