Cathy Grossu was going about her day when her phone lit up with a text from her daughter Cristina. The message, sent from a small plane somewhere over North Carolina, contained just four words: “We’re in trouble.”
Those were the last words Grossu ever received from her daughter.
Minutes later, the plane carrying Cristina, her husband NASCAR champion Greg Biffle, and five others crashed, killing everyone aboard.
“She texted me from the plane and she said, ‘We’re in trouble.’ And that was it,” Grossu said through tears. “So we’re devastated. We’re brokenhearted.”
The crash claimed seven lives: Greg and Cristina Biffle, their son Ryder, Greg’s daughter Emma from a previous relationship, Dennis Dutton and his son Jack, and Craig Wadsworth. They were flying to Florida for what should have been a celebration, a birthday trip that turned into tragedy.
“To think that they would be killed on a birthday trip, that was just such a fun time for the family,” Grossu said. “And to see the horrific way that it ended, it’s just, it is so hard to bear. I cannot believe they’re gone.”
The day before they boarded that plane, the Biffles had stopped by Grossu’s home. It was an ordinary visit, the kind where you don’t think to memorize every word because you assume there will be countless more visits to come.
Now Grossu tortures herself trying to remember.
“I don’t remember what the last words that I said to my daughter or to Greg or to my precious Ryder,” she said. “I don’t remember. I know we hugged, but I don’t remember those last words and that’s going to haunt me. But they were happy.”
They were happy. That’s what makes it unbearable.
Federal investigators arrived at the North Carolina crash site Friday to begin the painstaking work of determining what went wrong. The National Transportation Safety Board will examine wreckage, interview any witnesses, and try to reconstruct the aircraft’s final moments.
But no investigation will answer the question that matters most to Grossu: Why? Why did a birthday celebration end this way? Why did her daughter have time to send a brief warning but no time to say goodbye?
Greg “The Biff” Biffle grew up in Vancouver, Washington, cutting his teeth on short tracks around the Pacific Northwest before breaking into NASCAR in 1996. He made history as the first driver to win championships in both the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2000 and the NASCAR Busch Series in 2002.
He raced in NASCAR’s top tier, the Cup Series, from 2003 to 2016, winning 19 races and finishing second in the 2005 season standings. He built a career, raised a family, and was flying to Florida to celebrate another year with the people he loved.
Dennis Dutton and his son Jack were making that same trip, a father and son who will now be buried together. Craig Wadsworth, close enough to the Biffles to join a family birthday celebration, never made it to Florida either.
Four words on a phone screen. “We’re in trouble.”
Grossu will carry those words for the rest of her life, the final message from a daughter who knew something was terribly wrong but couldn’t say more. Whether the emergency unfolded too quickly for a longer message, or whether Cristina was trying not to panic her mother with details she couldn’t fix anyway, Grossu will never know.
She knows they hugged the day before. She knows they were happy. And she knows that sometimes life gives you no warning before it takes everything away.
Except for four words on a phone.
