Former NCAA woman of year Karenna Groff dies in plane crash - ESPN

Karenna Groff, a former MIT soccer player named the 2022 NCAA woman of the year, died Saturday along with members of her family in a plane crash in upstate New York.

The twin-engine Mitsubishi MU-2B went down shortly after noon in a muddy field in Copake, New York, near the Massachusetts line, killing everyone on board, according to authorities and a family member who spoke to The Associated Press.

Shortly before the crash, the pilot had radioed air traffic control at Columbia County Airport to say he had missed the initial approach and requested a new approach plan, officials with the National Transportation Safety Board said at a Sunday briefing. While preparing the new coordinates, air traffic controllers attempted to relay a low altitude alert three times, with no response from the pilot and no distress call, officials said.

Investigators obtained video of the final seconds of the flight, which «appears to show that the aircraft was intact and crashed at a high rate of descent into the ground,» NTSB official Todd Inman told reporters.

Among the victims were Groff; her father, Dr. Michael Groff, a neuroscientist; her mother, Dr. Joy Saini, a urogynecologist; her brother, Jared Groff, a 2022 graduate of Swarthmore College who worked as a paralegal; Alexia Couyutas Duarte, Jared Groff's partner who also graduated Swarthmore and planned to attend Harvard Law School this fall; and Karenna Groff's boyfriend, James Santoro, another recent MIT graduate, according to a family statement Sunday.

Santoro's father, John Santoro, told the AP that his son first met Karenna Groff as a freshman studying at MIT. Groff, who grew up in Weston, Massachusetts, was an All-American soccer player studying biomedical engineering. Santoro, a