Gabriela Lavoy sat in her Texas home Wednesday morning and thought back to when she spoke to her son days before he died, a phone call in which he revealed he was planning on getting married to his girlfriend and would spend Christmas with his mom for the first time in two years since he was deployed overseas.
But her boy, 33-year-old Tech. Sgt. Zach Emmett Lavoy — an airman with the 1st Special Operations Squadron — never made it home. He, alongside seven other air commandos, died after their CV-22 Osprey crashed off the coast of Japan on Nov. 29 due to a still unpublicized and unspecified mechanical failure that occurred with the controversial tilt-rotor aircraft.
“My son was always hesitant about getting on that plane. He never said he was scared, but he had a feeling, I guess,” Lavoy told Military.com on the phone Wednesday, adding she had not gotten any new information from the Air Force on what went wrong on her son’s training mission.
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Nearly 2,000 miles away from her home in Texas, lawmakers on a House oversight subcommittee in Washington, D.C., were grilling Navy and Defense Department officials Wednesday, asking about the November crash, as well as why the Osprey has contributed to a staggering 20 service member deaths in the last two years — including three other crashes with the Marine Corps since March 2022.
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