‘Infuriating’: Former fiancee of American Airlines Flight 5342 pilot rebukes Donald Trump’s DEI allegations

(WASHINGTON) — For the family and friends of Jonathan Campos — the captain of American Airlines Flight 5342, which plunged into the Potomac River on Wednesday after colliding with a Black Hawk helicopter — the feelings of grief that followed the news of his death were quickly replaced by anger.

As President Donald Trump made unfounded claims blaming diversity, equity and inclusion policies for contributing to the midair collision, Campos’ former fiancee said her loved one’s death quickly became politicized, overshadowing his life story and interrupting the family’s grief.

“This man’s body hadn’t even been pulled out of the river yet, and we’re talking about him being unqualified because his name is Campos,” Nicole Suissa told ABC News.

One day after the deadliest American plane crash in over two decades, Trump suggested during a White House briefing that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation were partially to blame for the collision.

“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” the president said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”

While the cause of the crash remains undetermined and families only beginning to grieve, blaming diversity hiring on the crash was “enraging” and “infuriating” Suissa said.

“What really irked me to no end was it was, the next day they published Jonathan’s name and Jonathan’s very Puerto Rican-looking face, all I could hear in the back of my head was all these people, all these DEI fear-mongering people going, ‘You see, I knew he’d be Hispanic,’ and I lost my mind,” Suissa said. “The politicization of this man’s death is entirely inappropriate. It is abhorrent. It is disgraceful. It is insensitive to say the least.”

As of Tuesday, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board were in the early stages of identifying the cause of the midair collision that killed 67 people combined on both aircraft. Authorities have been able to identify 55 sets of remains and are continuing to recover the fuselage of the commercial airliner from the Potomac.

As the recovery operation and investigation continues, Suissa said she hopes people remember Campos for the man she knew and loved for the last 20 years — someone who overcame the hardship of his life to achieve his goal of being a professional pilot before that dream was cut short.

“He was doing everything right. He did everything he was supposed to do,” she said. “He was a by-the-book pilot, and he did everything he was supposed to do, and I thought when you do everything right, that you get to live.”

Suissa first met Campos during their freshman year at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, New York, watching him work for years to achieve his life goal of becoming a pilot. A 2015 graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Campos flew aircraft for over a decade, including for at least six years with American Airlines. If anyone would have been able to safely land that plane last week, Suissa said she believes it would have been Campos.

“He would have done everything, everything in his power to land that plane because there were 60 people on it, and he never took that lightly,” she said.

Campos admired his father, who was an officer with the New York Police Department. But when his father died in 1999 of liver failure when Campos was just 9 years old, it fell on his stepmother and aunt to raise him. Both women traveled to Washington, D.C., after the crash to identify their son, Suissa said.

“I still wanted him to, you know, live this long, happy, fulfilling life, and I wanted him, I certainly wanted him to outlive his father,” she said. “For 15 years of my life, I thought I’d be signing his marriage license, not his death certificate. So here we are.”

Suissa herself knew Campos for more than 20 years, dating on and off, getting engaged before breaking it off, and ultimately settling on being close friends.

“It’s funny, actually, we each went to prom with someone else — more out of spite than anything,” she said. “Over the years, we had kind of accepted that the romantic piece of it was over, and we remained friends. We never really stopped talking to one another.”

Suissa — who is planning Campos’ funeral and serving as the family spokesperson — recounted their pastime of doing escape rooms across the country, including in Las Vegas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Orlando, Florida.

“We would beat the whole thing, just the two of us, in under an hour,” she said. “We sort of complemented each other in that way. Our temperaments didn’t complement each other, but our talents did.”

She described Campos as the ultimate adrenaline junkie, learning to instruct other pilots, fly helicopters, scuba dive, snowboard and skydive.

While Campos liked pushing his limits during his hobbies, Suissa said he took nothing as seriously as he did flying commercially. Epic Flight Academy — where Campos worked as an instructor — remembered him as “a skilled and dedicated pilot with an undeniable passion for flying.”

As she plans Campos’ funeral, she said she’s come to terms with the fact that he’s gone, though the political debate surrounding his death continues to enrage her.

“I don’t doubt for a moment that if there was anything at all he could have done to avert it, he would have,” she said.