The daughter of a Jacksonville lawyer was one of the passengers on board the American Airlines flight that collided with an Army helicopter Jan. 29.
Peter Nicandri told News4JAX that his daughter, Melissa Nicandri, was one of the passengers killed.
There were 60 passengers and four crew members on the passenger jet. The helicopter had a crew of three. All died in the collision.
Peter Nicandri is a shareholder at Milam Howard Nicandri & Gillam at 14 E. Bay St. Downtown.
Melissa Nicandri graduated from Ponte Vedra High School. She went to Vanderbilt University and then on to Johns Hopkins University before getting a job in New York City.
He wanted the world to know he was proud of his daughter and everything she accomplished.
“She’s just anything that anyone would want in a daughter. She was beautiful. Smart. Kind. Generous. Funny. She was a great sister. She was a great friend. She worked hard and had so much ahead of her,” Nicandri said.
He said he learned about her death when he received a phone call from her boyfriend, who told him the 28-year-old was on Flight 5342, which took off from Wichita, Kansas, and collided with the Blackhawk helicopter that had four crew members outside Reagan National Airport.
“They’ve already given us a timeline of the investigation so we will be monitoring, but it seems pretty obvious what happened, so we will see what the results are, but whatever the results are, it’s not going to change the fact that our daughter is gone.”
News4Jax.com is a Jacksonville Daily Record News partner. You can see the story on the News4Jax website here.