An Ice Skater and Her Mom Were Moving to a Bigger House. Then, Their Plane Crashed.


Left: Olivia Ter, 12, in a family photograph.
Right: Olesya Taylor, 50, Olivia Ter’s mother.
12:19 JST, February 3, 2025
The last time Andrew Ter spoke to his 12-year-old daughter Olivia was over WhatsApp. She was with her mom, playing with a century-old typewriter at the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum.
Olivia marveled at the fact that there was no backspace. Her mom marveled at her. Her daughter had just participated in the elite U.S. Figure Skating National Development Camp and was already nailing tricky moves like triple toe loops and triple salchow jumps.
Hours later, Olivia and her mother, Olesya Taylor, 50, of Alexandria, Virginia, would board American Eagle Flight 5342, which collided with a Black Hawk helicopter Wednesday night inbound to Reagan National Airport. The crash left no survivors.
Andrew Ter, 51, didn’t join his family on the trip. He wanted to go, he said Friday, but was overseeing the construction of a new house he’d designed to accommodate the needs of his two growing daughters and extended family. The house was nearing completion and he was eager to get the project done.
That was before his immediate family would be ruthlessly cleaved in half, like the airplane itself.
“I don’t know what to do right now,” Ter whispered near the special plates his wife had hand-selected for the new place. “I don’t need that house anymore.”
Ter, an Armenian refugee from Azerbaijan, devoted much of his adulthood to succeeding in his IT job so his wife could stay at home with the kids. He and Taylor, originally from Mykolaiv, Ukraine, wanted to provide Olivia and her sister, Anne Valerie, 14, with every opportunity the United States had to offer.
The girls took full advantage. It wasn’t long before Olivia started exhibited signs of a star athlete. She could whip a softball out of the ballpark. Her tennis coach pleaded with the family to transition her to full-time training.
But her primary passion, Ter said, was figure skating.
“That’s all she wanted to do,” he said. “All she wanted to do is ice skating and ice skating.”
Olivia got serious about the sport during the pandemic, when the local rink was one of the few places still open.
“That was the only outlet,” Ter said.
His daughter was exhilarated by the sensation of speeding across the ice and surging into the air, he said. Before long she was frequenting half the rinks across the D.C. region and receiving coaching from Olympic champion Ilia Kulik. Taylor would accompany her to each lesson and take notes in the sidelines to help her daughter improve, Ter said.
“She was on that road to Olympic level,” said Maria Elena Pinto, a skating coach at Ion International Skating Center in Leesburg, Virginia, where Olivia trained. “In my heart, I know she would have made it.”
Olivia was a fixture at the rink, Pinto said, often acting goofy, drilling her combinations and cheering up her friends on bad days.
“She was someone and is someone I still idolize as a skater,” said fellow skater Victoria Becker, 17. “Even though I started later than she did and I wasn’t on the same level, she treated me like someone who was amazing, like I deserved to be there as much as she did.”
When it was time to go home from a day at the rink, Olivia would “give her mom the puppy eyes and go, ‘Mommy please, please can I stay?’ ” Pinto said. Taylor usually relented.
“Everybody loved that little girl and her mother,” Pinto said.
For Taylor and Ter, it was important that Olivia be not only an accomplished athlete, but a well-rounded student. And she rose to the occasion. She loved spelling, her father said, and was a grade ahead in math.
“She watched her older sister being first and being best and making all the achievements and winning awards and she tried to keep up,” Ter said. “She wanted to have a whole shelf full of medals like her older sister.”
And, by the end of her life, she did.
Sitting inside his daughter’s bedroom surrounded by her medals, toys and clothes, Ter described Olivia as having a nearly insatiable appetite to learn and explore. Her short life was filled with rich experiences – swims in the Atlantic Ocean, deep and soulful friendships characteristic of someone far beyond her years, and travels including a vacation the family took in November to Paris. Olivia wanted to see the Eiffel Tower.
Though she was highly ambitious, Olivia’s personality was far from rigid, friends and family said. She had a sarcasm more typical of a 30-year-old than a tween and enjoyed making silly videos including one she and her sister did imitating Donald Trump’s inauguration. She draped a lock of hair to the other side of her head to mimic him while her sister lowered a wide-brimmed hat over her forehead, impersonating Melania Trump.
“She has this bubbly aura to her,” Becker said.
Pinto said she enjoyed watching Olivia’s reserved instructor, Sergii Baranov, crack into a smile with “her cuteness.” The tween even turned him into “a Swiftie,” Pinto said.
Olivia treated her relationships with a sense of maturity more typical of an adult than a middle-schooler, her dad said. She was selective about who she spent a lot of time with and prized a few close friendships over a large group or maintaining popularity.
“It almost looks like she was an older person in a young body,” Ter said.
Olesya Taylor, was a profoundly generous person, Ter said of his wife. She loved children and studied in Russia to be a neonatologist – the medical specialty of caring for premature babies or infants born with congenital disorders.
Taylor came to the United States in 1998, partly because of the death of her father from cancer and a desire to flee the place she’d experienced that tragedy, Ter said. The couple met working at a small company. Ter was drawn to her magnetic beauty and kind spirit, he said. They married in 2007.
When the kids came along, she became a stay-at-home mom. It was a job she took as seriously and carried out as diligently as medicine, Ter said.
Taylor was highly social and easy to befriend, Ter said. She always went the extra mile for those in her community – volunteering at a medical clinic that served homeless people, picking up friends from the airport late at night, bringing the best gift to a baby shower.
“She had like hundreds and hundreds of people she stayed in touch with,” Ter said. “She was an open soul.”
For Ter, the evening of the crash was a fever dream. He went to the airport to pick them up. At 8:44 p.m., his wife texted they were landing. Ten minutes passed. Then 20. Then 30.
Emergency lights flashed. He saw running. Then fire engines. Ambulances and police appeared.
Ter rushed aimlessly through the airport and spoke to a man he flagged down inside. The man’s demeanor grew dark when he learned which flight Ter’s family was on.
“He said – two times – ‘Are you sure they were on the Wichita flight? Are you positive?’” Ter said. “He was trying to prepare me.”
Olivia had taught herself to swim on family trips to Florida. Taylor was a strong swimmer as well, Ter said. If the plane had crash landed in the water, surely the could reach to the surface. Maybe they were sitting on a ledge somewhere along the Potomac River, he thought.
“I was in denial,” he said. “I was hoping for a miracle.”
The next day a detective called. His wife’s body had been found.
“It was supposed to be me,” he said.
Ter had long tried to prepare his family for life without him, keeping them looped in on family finances and developing contingency plans. He hadn’t considered that, one day, it might be him who needed to go on without them.
“I was never, ever prepared for that,” he said, his voice breaking up.
One of the last things Olivia Ter did in her life was write on the typewriter at the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum. The museum staff collected even the scrap pages on which she tested out various keys, said museum director Eric Cale. Ter had written a letter on the typewriter. The museum stamped it and put it in the mail for the next day.
When they heard the news, they quickly retrieved it, realizing this was likely a precious final remnant of her young life. The staff plans on sending it to her father, Cale said.
As for the new house, Ter is unsure of what’s best for the family now. And for himself.
“I don’t need an 8,000 square foot house, but I cannot be in this house here. I can’t,” he said. “I am lost.”
"News Services" POPULAR ARTICLE
-
Executives at Japan’s Fuji TV and Parent Firm Resign over a Sex Scandal Linked to a Former Star
-
Japan’s Nikkei Stock Logs Worst Day in 4 Months on US Tariff Worries; Automakers Slump (UPDATE 2)
-
Japan’s Nikkei Stock Falls over 1% as Chip-Related Shares Track Nasdaq Lower (UPDATE 1)
-
Japan’s Nikkei Stock down Nearly 1% as Tech Shares Stumble (UPDATE 1)
-
Japan’s Nikkei Stock Average Ends Lower as Strong Yen Hurts Appetite (Update 1)
JN ACCESS RANKING