An experienced pilot and three passengers were all killed last week when their unresponsive private jet crashed into a wooded area in Waynesboro, Virginia.
Investigators are looking into hypoxia – lack of oxygen in the blood – as the reason why the pilot nor the passengers responded to the FAA when the jet entered restricted airspace.
Among those onboard were Adina Azarian, a single mother and her two-year-old daughter, Aria.
According to family and friends, Adina was a devoted mother who rarely spent time away from her toddler.
“Aria was her whole world. She tried so hard to have her,” Stephen White, Adina’s older brother told Patch.
Adina, who worked as a realtor on Long Island and for her own company in Manhattan, was a single mother. She was also part of a memoir-writing class where she wrote “extensively” about her daughter.
“I really don’t know what the repercussions are going to be from raising my daughter in a solo-parent household. Of course, I sometimes think about it. But the reality is, I do have a partner in raising her, she just happens to be a lovely woman with a backbone from Jamaica, not the husband/father I may have once imagined,” she wrote, according to the East Hampton Star.
Her teacher, Andrew Visconti, said she was the first in the class to open up about an extremely personal matter, and it’s what Visconti said “really started the glue of the group.”
Through her writing Adina revealed the struggle she went through to bring Aria earthside.
“She wrote a lot about the incredible complexity of having a child on your own, doing in vitro, having a surrogate, going through a hugely complex and expensive process to finally have this extraordinary child, Aria,” Gillian Gordon, one of Adina’s classmates, said.
Adina also shared her journey to motherhood on Facebook writing, “I offer my story as a source of inspiration for any woman going through the same struggles with infertility or simply with the decision to create your own family on our own terms. Sometimes life takes you places where you didn’t imagine it at first but where there is faith, where there is courage, where there is God, there is also hope.”
After Aria was born, the mother-daughter duo rarely spent time apart.
“I don’t think they ever weren’t together, so if Adina was going anywhere, Aria was always with her,” childhood friend Tara Brivic-Looper said.
Judy Sahagian, another friend, commented how women worked hard their entire lives and look forward to leaving behind a legacy, most often a family. But in Adina’s case her family died with her.
“And her daughter dying with her. And all the trouble she went through to have a daughter — oh, my God.”
My heart is broken. Let this be a reminder to us all how precious life is.
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