How do you tell your 12-year-old son that his mother and older brother most likely died in a plane crash?
That was the question facing Douglas Lane on the evening of Jan. 29 as his cellphone was filling up with alerts about an American Eagle plane colliding with an Army helicopter over the Potomac River, a plane that he knew his wife, Christine Lane, and son Spencer Lane were aboard.
“I looked at Milo, I didn’t really know what to tell him,” Lane, who lives in Rhode Island, told NBC News in his first interview since the tragedy. “In my gut, I knew what the outcome was. But I didn’t want to say that they were gone until I knew they were gone.”
“I had to really kind of word it very carefully so that he would still have some hope, but I also didn’t want to create false hope,” Lane said.
Milo “took it pretty well,” he said. “He’s pretty resilient.”
Final confirmation that the mother and son had perished, along with the 62 other people on the plane and the three soldiers on the Black Hawk helicopter, came the next day when Lane and his sister took the train to Washington, D.C.