Not long after Staff Sgt. Ryan O’Hara was killed in a fiery crash above the Potomac River last week, his parents said they received an offer from American Airlines to fly them over the accident site.

But their pain was too raw to accept, said Gary O’Hara, his father. Besides, he and his wife, Mary, wanted to remember that route along the river, with the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument glowing in the dark, as their son had described it.

Again and again, Sergeant O’Hara, a Black Hawk helicopter crew chief, had told them that he loved flying around Washington, his father recalled: “Dad, you can see everything because we’re flying so low. You can see every detail. It’s just spectacular.”

It was on a night like that, in a moonless sky over a sparkling city on Jan. 29, that Sergeant O’Hara and the helicopter’s two pilots were killed, now forever linked by the nation’s worst aviation crash in nearly 25 years.

For reasons still being investigated, the helicopter collided with a passenger plane carrying 64 people. Everyone died, including Sergeant O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Ga., a new father and, according to his parents, a mechanical genius; Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves, 39, from Great Mills, Md., who had flown that route along the Potomac “probably hundreds” of times, a friend said; and Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, 28, of Durham, N.C., who had hoped to become a doctor.

President Trump has questioned how it was possible that the crew did not see the American Airlines plane, and his supporters have speculated whether the push for more women and minorities in the military might have played a role, with no evidence suggesting that. Sergeant O’Hara’s father called the collision “a terribly tragic accident” and wondered out loud why the air traffic control tower didn’t order the helicopter to stop short of the plane and just hover.

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