One of the passengers, Karenna Groff, was a former MIT soccer player who played for the U.S. team in the 2016 Maccabiah Games in Israel.

By JNS

A private plane carrying six passengers on their way to the Catskills to celebrate Passover crashed in upstate New York on Saturday, killing everyone on board, the Associated Press reported.

Among those killed were Karenna Groff and her longtime boyfriend, James Santoro, both MIT graduates. Santoro worked for a hedge fund, and Groff, a former college soccer player who was named the 2022 NCAA woman of the year, had enrolled in medical school at New York University. Groff also played for the U.S. team in the 2016 Maccabiah Games in Israel.

The other four casualties in the crash included Groff’s brother, Jared, and his partner, Alexia Couyutas Duarte, as well as Groff’s parents, Joy Saini, a urogynecologist, and Michael, a distinguished neuroscientist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

“He was just a very human human being,” Dr. E. Antonio Chiocca, a longtime colleague of Michael, told The Boston Globe. “He was very well-liked, very empathetic, very charismatic, very kind. He’s Jewish, so we’d say, ‘He’s a real mensch.’”

“They were a wonderful family,” Santoro’s father said in a statement to the AP shortly after the crash. “The world lost a lot of very good people who were going to do a lot of good for the world if they had the opportunity. We’re all personally devastated.”

The New York Post reported that Michael Groff, an experienced pilot, was operating his private jet, which had flown for less than an hour before the crash, with no issues, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman told reporters at a briefing on Sunday.

Groff was flying under instrument flight rules, which are used in poor visibility conditions, as opposed to visual flight rules, but it was too soon to say if reduced visibility from weather conditions was to blame for the wreck, Inman said, adding that a full accident report could take 12-24 months to complete.