As firefighters and police divers scanned the icy water the night of the plane crash, D.C. firefighter technician Chris Finelli remembers an unusual sight amid the wreckage.
“What’s this figure skate doing at the bottom of the Potomac?” Finelli, who manned a boat for DC Fire & EMS, recalled. “I couldn’t figure out why [there was] a shiny, white, girl’s figure skate.”
He’d later learn that skate almost certainly belonged to one of the 67 victims – many of them young figure skaters – of the midair collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army Black Hawk helicopter…