Widows of Flight 5342 Victims Navigate Grief Together After Deadly Potomac Crash

The day before American Eagle Flight 5342 was due home from Kansas, Mikey Stovall texted his wife Ashleigh: "Miss you guys a lot I'm going to have to wake everybody up when I get home btw." Ashleigh put their 11-year-old son Jake to bed at 8:30 p.m. and waited. Mikey never arrived.

Stovall was one of seven friends from Southern Maryland who had spent nearly a week on a duck hunting trip to Kansas, then boarded Flight 5342 together to fly home on January 29, 2025. Jesse Pitcher, Tommy Clagget, Jon Boyd, Steve Johnson, Charles McDaniel, and Alex Huffman were with him when a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter struck the regional jet over the Potomac River on approach to Ronald Reagan National Airport. All 67 people aboard both aircraft died.

"It's a big loss. I can feel it every day," Ashleigh Stovall said of her husband. They had been married more than 19 years.

The seven men left behind seven widows, who have been navigating grief as a group in the months since. Eight months after the collision, one widow stepped into a federal courthouse.

Rachel Crafton, who is raising three young boys without their father, filed a wrongful-death suit in federal court in Washington on September 24, 2025, against American Airlines, its regional subsidiary PSA Airlines, and the U.S. government. Her husband Casey Crafton, a former aviation mechanic and technical service manager from Connecticut, was among the passengers. At a press conference at the National Press Club, Rachel said Casey had been "betrayed by this system he trusted." "Today, we are taking legal action because the accountability of American Airlines, PSA Airlines, and the Army and FAA is the only way to ensure this never happens again," her statement read, "and no other family has to live with the pain we have to endure each day without Casey."

The 10-count complaint alleges that American Airlines and PSA "manipulated and abused" the arrival rate system at Ronald Reagan National Airport, forcing more aircraft through the facility per hour than safety warranted. The lawsuit also faults the Army flight crew for failing to operate the Black Hawk helicopter at an appropriate altitude and the FAA for flight control's failure to properly separate the two aircraft.

Federal investigators had already identified altitude as the collision's critical variable. During public hearings in July 2025, National Transportation Safety Board investigators said the Black Hawk's crew may have had a "lower than actual altitude understanding" of their position as they approached the airport. Data recovered from the wreckage showed pressure altitude values were 80 to 100 feet lower than actual height above mean sea level at the time of the collision. The helicopter, a Sikorsky UH-60, better known as a Black Hawk, was flying 100 feet above its authorized altitude when it struck Flight 5342.

Bob Clifford, the attorney representing the Crafton family, said the airlines had denied culpability up to this point. The Crafton filing was the first formal wrongful-death complaint to emerge from the disaster. Attorneys indicated more complaints will be submitted and consolidated in the coming months.

Jake Stovall was 11 years old when his father died, now growing up alongside the three young Crafton boys in households shaped by the same sequence of institutional failures that Rachel Crafton is now forcing into a courtroom. The widows from the hunting trip did not choose their solidarity. The system they trusted chose it for them.