Children remember Valley pilot who died in snorkeling accident

PHOENIX — Theo Duncan was busy studying in his dorm at ASU. It was late March and his freshman year finals were approaching when his phone suddenly rang. It was his father’s girlfriend, telling him the terrible news that his father had died in a snorkeling accident.

Theo, 19, ran out of his dorm room. He frantically paced up and down the street, looking for an Uber or a taxi. He had to get to his younger sister Tara.

He didn’t know it, but Tara was hours away in Tucson on a Model UN class trip. He had no choice but to call her.

“He tells me, he tries to break the news slowly,” Tara Duncan remembers. “Everything is kind of frozen.”

For her, her father Keith Duncan was invincible.

“He was really about traveling the world and living life to the fullest,” Tara said.

Keith was a single father of two children. They lived in Phoenix but traveled the world together.

“Hawaii and Jamaica, we went to the Bahamas and so on and went diving in all those areas,” Theo said.

Keith was a helicopter pilot in the Army. His love of flying and adventure eventually led him to become a pilot for JetBlue.

“He always said, ‘Come on, try harder. You have to think outside the box. You have to try new things,'” Tara said.

On his days off, Keith enjoyed skydiving, scuba diving, hiking or skiing.

He was a proud pilot, but an even prouder father.

“He told us countless stories about mishaps with his plane and just dismissed them as if it was no big deal. I remember one of the worst cases was when he flew out of the Caribbean and had an engine failure,” said Theo.

However, during a stopover with his girlfriend in Curacao, Keith was snorkeling. Few details are known, but he had an accident and drowned a few minutes after entering the water.

Theo and Tara were in Arizona and had no family that they knew of.

Keith’s friends came to help.

“From Reykjavik to Brazil, from Austin to Austria, people all over the world had been involved with Keith, coming from all over the place to help us with things,” said Douglas Taylor, a fellow pilot and friend of Keith’s. “We got along well because in aviation, only three percent of us are African-American. And so when you see another African-American in aviation, you think we’re going to be friends, and we were.”

Douglas Taylor runs an online forum for aviation experts from around the world. He shared the news of Keith’s death in a post that sent shockwaves through the community – a community that is trying to support Theo and Tara as the teenagers grapple with documents and the legal and financial challenges that come with losing a life in a foreign country.

Friends of the family have set up a GoFundMe page to help the children deal with their unimaginable grief. A link to donate can be found here.

“I just try to do exactly what I think he would be proud of and what he would expect of me,” Theo said.

Theo will continue to study computer science at ASU and Tara will be a senior in high school with dreams of becoming a doctor. They share their father’s adventurous life with the world, carrying his superhero spirit with them wherever they go.

“Even though his life was so short, he can definitely say that he accomplished a lot more than a lot of other people accomplish in their entire lives. And I think that’s really something to focus on when you look back on things,” Tara said.

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