Alexia Couyutas Duarte, born in Miami and bound for Harvard Law School in the fall, had a simple goal for her future: “I want to be a Supreme Court justice,” she told her family.
A viable goal for Alexia, a Swarthmore College Class of 2023 economics and political science grad. Perhaps a grandiose reach for most.
“It was not just the good thing. It was the amazing thing. It was the exceptional thing,” her eldest sibling Maria Claudia Couyutas Duarte said.
That was her sister’s way of setting goals. Reach higher.
“She would make those things happen,” she said. It wasn’t just like, ‘Let me do this one thing. I’ll do the most amazing one possible.’”
Alexia and her partner Jared Groff, a fellow Swarthmore 2022 grad, were inseparable.
“Truly soulmates,” Maria Claudia said.
The couple started dating during her junior year at Swarthmore. Groff, 26, was part of a basketball squad that reached the NCAA Division III National Championship game in his time at the suburban Pennsylvania college. Post-studies, he was a law school aspirant and a paralegal.
Life was good. Then, suddenly, it turned tragic.
The couple, along with three members of Groff’s family including his parents Michael and Joy, his sister Karenna and her partner James Santoro, were killed when the twin-engine Mitsubishi MU-2B they were riding in to a Passover celebration in the Catskills crashed Saturday into a field in Copake, New York.
Maria Claudia’s voice quivers and sobs as she reflects on past conversations with her siblings as each grew into the demands of adulthood and how life for the family is forever changed.
“I used to tell the three of them, ‘Hey guys, we gotta remain together.’ Like being the cheerleader older sister, right? ‘We gotta remain together. We’ve got to keep in touch separate from Mom because one day Mom is not going to be here. And it’s important that the four of us are still together.’ The last thing I could have ever imagined is that she wouldn’t be.”
Recent string of air disasters
The plane crash that killed six on Saturday, April 12, was the third air tragedy on three subsequent days.
Three members of Palm Beach County’s Stark family — Robert, 81, his son Stephen, 54, and Stephen’s daughter Brooke Stark, 17, a senior at Delray Beach’s Atlantic High School — were aboard a Cessna 310 bound for Tallahassee. The plane crashed April 11 near Boca Raton Airport in the area of Military Trail and Glades Road. A driver was injured when the plane hit his car and pushed it onto railroad tracks near I-95.
A day earlier, Thursday, April 10, a family of five from Spain were celebrating their middle son’s coming ninth birthday. They all died when their sightseeing helicopter shattered and crashed into the Hudson River between New York City and New Jersey. The pilot also was killed.
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Explore all your optionsA Miami scholar’s roots
Alexia Couyutas Duarte, 24, along with her siblings Maria Claudia, 30, and 21-year-old twins Ariana and Constantinos, were born in Miami to an entrepreneur mother and a father who worked in real estate.
For much of her childhood, Alexia lived on the border between Colombia and Venezuela with their mom, Claudia Duarte Garcia.
“She lived on the Venezuelan side, but she went to school on the Colombian side and she would commute every day over the bridge,” her best friend Charlotte Pasko, 23, said. The tumultuous territory and its effect on residents of both sides set the course for the ambitious, empathetic young woman.
“She wanted to explore the areas of immigration law given her background,” Pasko said. “I had never met somebody with such dedication and honor. She was really, honestly, one of the most special people I’ve ever known.”
When relations between the two countries frayed, the bridge would shut down and Alexia realized she needed to move back to Miami to continue her education, Pasko said.
In 2016, the girl who loved the color yellow, photography and all things Miami — the ocean, marine life like dolphins and sea turtles, the Miami Heat and the evolving skyline — moved in with her eldest sister, Maria, in Coral Gables to further her schooling.
Alexia attended International Studies Charter High School on Southwest Eighth Street in Miami for her junior and senior years. She, along with her best friend Pasko, later spent a year studying abroad at the London School of Economics, and she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore. That’s where she met Pasko and inspired her youngest sister, Ariana, to seek her degree in English literature and classics.
The sisters were “inseparable,” Maria Claudia said as she passed the phone to the youngest, a tearful Ariana.
“She always had an answer for everything and she was willing to do whatever it took for her siblings,” Ariana said. “She helped me go through life. She knew exactly what she wanted because she was going to be that. She never faltered. There was never a moment of hesitation. She knew what had to be done and she just did it.”
“She defied the odds on everything,” Maria Claudia added. “She gave 110% on everything she did. Everything. As a friend. As a sister. Daughter. As a girlfriend to Jared. As a granddaughter. She was just 110% always.”
A Miami visit
Last Christmas, Alexia and Maria Claudia paired up again for a trip home to Miami to celebrate the holidays with family.
“Miami’s home. No matter where she went to college, she would come back. She met me in Orlando, because I live in Orlando now. We drove down and we were going over the bridge coming down I-95 into 836 and we saw the downtown skyline and we both said at the same time, ‘There’s just something about it.’ Just something about it,” Maria Claudia said.
After Alexia completed her undergraduate courses in December 2023 and attended her graduation ceremony alongside Pasko in May 2024, Alexia worked as a legal intake specialist at the Rian Immigrant Center in Boston. She lived with Jared, her boyfriend, and worked as a paralegal in the pro bono initiative unit at the Framingham, Massachusetts-based MetroWest Legal Services.
The couple’s relationship was idyllic, her sisters and Pasko said. Except for the basketball rivalry.
“There was a forever fight between her and her boyfriend who was not just a basketball player but a huge Boston Celtics fan,” quipped Maria Claudia. “That did not go very well at times.” Alexia was a big Miami Heat fan.
Alexia planned to attend Harvard Law School in the coming fall semester. She wanted to pay tribute to the sacrifices her mother had made.
“She wanted my mom to know that because of her hard work and dedication as a single mom that her child could go to Harvard School of Law. It was important. She idolized my mom, as she should, because my mom is amazing,” said Maria Claudia, a mental health counselor who earned her advanced degree at Barry University near Miami Shores.
“That was her dream, always, since the day I met her, to go to Harvard Law — and she achieved that,” Pasko said. “It’s just heartbreaking that she’s not able to follow that path that she was called to follow.”
A final conversation between friends
The best friends’ final conversation happened less than 24 hours before the flight.
“I think I just realized through my friendship with her, the depth that a friendship could reach, and the ways that a person could truly know you and always want what was best for you. Friday, she was at Harvard Law accepted students’ day and I was at the Duke Law accepted students’ day. Given all of the adversity she’s faced in her life to get to that point and to achieve that goal, we were finally enjoying the fruits of that labor,” Pasko said from her home in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood.
“All week we were talking about what we were going to wear and how we were nervous and how we couldn’t wait to meet the other students,” Pasko said. “And on that Friday, at night, we kind of had a quick recap about how our days went and how we couldn’t have done it without each other. We said that we were going to have a call on Saturday to really talk about how everything went.
“And obviously that call never happened.”
Survivors
In addition to her sisters Maria Claudia and Ariana, Alexia Couyutas Duarte’s survivors include her brother Constantinos; mother Claudia Duarte Garcia; grandmother Lolita; aunts, uncles, cousins and friends.
Services will be private but her sister said they would like to hold a memorial ceremony on the beach in Miami at a later date. “She loved the beach,” Maria Claudia said.
