By Rich McKay, Hannah Lang and Eric Cox
(Reuters) – Kiah Duggins was a civil rights lawyer hailed as a justice warrior who fought against police abuse and protected people from eviction.
Bob and Lori Schrock were cutting-edge farmers who ran their own grain business and were traveling to visit their daughter. They, too, served others: through a Christian program providing counseling and education for young men experiencing trauma.
All three were among the 67 lives lost in the air disaster over Washington on Wednesday night, when a U.S. Army helicopter and a passenger jet collided near Reagan National Airport. As the investigation into the crash continues, more details about the victims have emerged.
Duggins, 30, an incoming professor at Washington’s Howard University, was returning home after visiting her family in Wichita, Kansas, where she grew up. She was a bright student and had been a policy intern for former First Lady Michelle Obama in the White House.
“It was an honor to be able to work in the White House, and not only work in the White House, but work for the first Black President, which would not have been possible through most of American history,” Duggins said in a 2017 article in an online newsletter called The Sunflower, describing her summer semester in Washington.
She had just been visiting her mother, Gwen, who was recently in hospital, media accounts said, and she was expecting to teach law at Howard this fall.
Duggins, a Harvard Law graduate and former Miss Kansas contestant, had worked for Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit legal group. Her litigation included challenging unconstitutional policing and money bail practices in Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, D.C., according to the group’s website.
Her online Harvard Law profile said her peers called her “force of nature”, who protected people from eviction during the COVID-19 pandemic while working at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, where the faculty and staff called her “a true justice warrior.”
In one case, Duggins successfully represented a woman who was being evicted for refusing to pay an unaffordable rent increase for an apartment with substandard conditions, the Harvard website said. She later negotiated a long-term affordable lease for the woman and her young child.
She also represented indigent defendants – people unable to afford a lawyer – in criminal matters for Harvard Defenders.
“My law school experience was totally defined by clinical and pro bono work,” Duggins is quoted as saying in her profile, adding that her experience with clients taught her “the technical elements of the law, and larger philosophical questions about what the law should be.”
Family friend and former Sedgwick County Commissioner Lacey Cruse remembered Duggins as a “brave and beautiful soul, a light in the fight for civil rights.”
“Her loss is heartbreaking, not only for her family and friends but for everyone who believes in justice and equality,” Cruse wrote in a Facebook post.
THE MOURNING OF BOB AND LORI SCHROCK
Bob and Lori Schrock, aged 58 and 56, were farmers from Kiowa, Kansas, a town of 2,400 people near the Oklahoma border. The couple were traveling from Wichita to Washington on their way to visit Villanova University in Pennsylvania, where their daughter Ellie is a student.
They were president and vice president of Premium Grain, Inc. in Kiowa, and were among the first farmers in the area to rotate winter wheat with winter canola to further crop yields and enhance soil health, according to the Kansas City Star.
They also set up a home in Maryland to be closer to their daughter.
“There are truly just gifts from God. They didn’t deserve any of this,” said Grace Cantrell, 20, a Kansas State University student who grew up with Bob and Lori’s daughter.
She called the couple a second “set of parents.”
Michael Simpson, a friend of Bob’s since the age of 11, got to know Bob through weightlifting and stayed close over the years. He said the Schrocks inspired him to quit his job and become the head of Freedom Gate Boys Ranch, a Christian program that provides a home, Christian education and trauma-informed counseling, the group’s website says.
Bob had quietly provided financial support to the program over the years, Simpson said, and both Bob and Lori were deeply rooted in their faith.
“I don’t have a lot of friends, so the ones I have are close, and he was one,” Simpson said.
(Reporting by Rich McKay, Hannah Lang and Eric Cox; Writing by Daniel Trotta; editing by Donna Bryson and Nia Williams)
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