Friends say Army captain killed in midair collision was a 'brilliant and fearless' patriot

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. Army captain who died in Wednesday's midair collision of a Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines jet was “brilliant and fearless” and “meticulous in everything she did,” friends and fellow soldiers said.

Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach was identified by the Army Saturday as one of three soldiers killed in the crash near Reagan National Airport just outside Washington, D.C. In all, 67 people died, including the jet's 60 passengers and 4 crew members.

Lobach, of Durham, North Carolina, had served as an Army aviation officer since July 2019, earning an Army commendation medal and an achievement medal after graduating from the University of North Carolina as a distinguished military graduate in the top 20% of ROTC cadets nationwide, her family said.

Last month, she escorted fashion designer Ralph Lauren at the White House when he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

USA Today White House correspondent Davis Winkie trained with Lobach in the University of North Carolina ROTC program. They were in the same training platoon at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 2018, and were friends ever since.

“Rebecca was brilliant and fearless, a talented pilot and a PT stud,” Winkie wrote in a social media post, using an abbreviation for physical training.

In a statement released by the Army, Lobach’s family said she had more than 450 hours of flight time and earned “certification as a pilot-in-command after extensive testing by the most senior and experienced pilots in her battalion.”

The Army released the names of the two other Black Hawk soldiers on Friday, but withheld Lobach’s name until Saturday at the request of her family. Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28, of Lilburn, Georgia, was the crew chief. Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, 39, of Great Mills, Maryland, was a pilot.

Lobach "was a patriot, she loved her country,” her close friend, Sam Brown, told WNCN-TV.

Lexi Freas credited Lobach’s mentorship for inspiring her to become an aviation officer in the District of Columbia National Guard.

“Not only did she care about being a leader and being the best officer she could, but also about being the best pilot she could," Freas told the Raleigh, North Carolina, station.

Another friend, Sabrina Bell, said Lobach “was meticulous in everything she did, she never did anything half-heartedly, she never did anything impulsively."

Lobach’s family noted that she served as a certified sexual harassment/assault response and prevention victim advocate and hoped to become a physician when she got out of the Army.

“We are devastated by the loss of our beloved Rebecca. She was a bright star in all our lives. She was kind, generous, brilliant, funny, ambitious and strong. No one dreamed bigger or worked harder to achieve her goals,” the statement said.

“We request that you please respect our privacy as we grieve this devastating loss,” Lobach’s family added.

After the crash, President Donald Trump blamed the helicopter for flying at too high an altitude, saying: “You had a pilot problem from the standpoint of the helicopter. I mean, because it was visual, it was very clear night.”

The remarks, combined with Trump’s rant about diversity initiatives in the air traffic controller ranks, only added to social media speculation, misinformation and vitriol about the makeup of the Black Hawk crew. No evidence has emerged that diversity rules factored into the collision.

Former military recruiter Bilal Kordab told WRAL-TV that Lobach was kind, intelligent and "put so much pressure on herself to be the best of the best and go the extra mile.”

Before transferring to the University of North Carolina, Lobach played Division III college basketball at the University of The South.

Winkie said he and Lobach were both latecomers to the ROTC program “and quickly bonded over being the new kids on the block.”

One day, while at Fort Knox learning about different Army officer career paths, Winkie said he and Lobach happened upon a small helicopter called a MH-6 Little Bird.

Winkie, who is 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall, said Lobach — listed at 5-foot-7 (1.7 meters) in her college basketball days — smiled mischievously at him and asked: “Think we can both fit?”

“I’ll be damned if we didn’t somehow stuff ourselves into that cockpit,” Winkie wrote in a tribute to Lobach on X, formerly known as Twitter. “My neck hurt, and I don’t think we would’ve been able to fly it very well, but we were both beaming in the selfie she took.”

Winkie wrote that soon after Wednesday’s crash he texted Lobach, asking: “you good?” He said he didn’t realize until the next day that the message hadn’t gone through.

Sisak reported from New York.

FILE - Army Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, right, of Durham, N.C., escorts fashion designer Ralph Lauren during a ceremony honoring Lauren and 17 others with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

FILE - Army Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, from left, of Durham, N.C., escorts fashion designer Ralph Lauren as President Joe Biden presents Lauren with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

FILE - Army Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, from left, of Durham, N.C., escorts fashion designer Ralph Lauren as President Joe Biden presents Lauren with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

FILE - Army Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, of Durham, N.C., is seen during the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

FILE - Army Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, of Durham, N.C., is pictured during the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

Roberto Marquez, of Dallas, places flowers at a memorial for the 67 victims of a midair collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight from Kansas near the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Saturday, Feb. 1, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)