'Don’t remember him for how he died'; Matthew Sweets' family open up on their tremendous loss

A year after the UPS crash, the family of Matthew Sweets opens up about the son, brother, partner and father they lost.

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By 8 p.m., Brooke Murray had stopped pretending.

Dinner had been ready since 5:30. Matt always came home around 6:30, after work and the gym, without fail. At 7 she texted him. At 8 she was pacing the house with a laptop and a phone while her two kids tugged at her sleeves.

"Will you play with me? Will you play with me?" the children kept asking their mom.

“Hold on, hold on,” she told them. “I just need to figure out where Daddy is.”

She had heard about a plane crash that afternoon and had texted a friend who lives near the airport, just to make sure she was okay. She remembers that text, because she thought checking in with her friend would be her only connection to the crash.

“Never knowing,” she told me, “that this was gonna completely blow my life apart.”

A year later, I sat in a living room with five members of the Sweets family and a scrapbook, and I could feel the weight of that night in the room. Pain and trauma were there, and so was anger. But the love was louder than any of it. Matthew Sweets was killed in the UPS Flight 2976 crash last November.

Have you heard the saying, the deeper the love, the deeper the grief? Everything they said that afternoon proved it.

They were nervous at first. I told them they could stop and restart anytime. Nobody stopped. We started with Halloween.

Halloween was always their holiday, the one they gathered for without questioning it. Last year was the best one yet. It was warm, there was chili, and the kids fought over candy.

“We were blissfully unaware of how lucky we were,” Carrie Ryan, Matthew's younger sister, said.

Matt spent that night filming his kids. His mother, Pam Sweets, remembers watching him follow his kids with his phone and feeling grateful they were all together. His sister, Michelle Sweets, has one photo from that night, and Matt is in the background, looking goofy.

“If I had known this was the last picture I was ever going to take of him,” she said, “I would have asked him to smile.”

Brooke has the last picture of their family of four. It was taken the day before, at a park, by a stranger who offered. Brooke told me a year later she is so glad she said yes. "That was a sweet memory from that day", she told me.

When the family thinks back to last year, the memory quickly shifts from sweet to scary.

Four days later, Brooke gave up her search and called Matt’s mother. Brooke knew Matt's last known location was on Grade Lane. That meant nothing to her. When she shared that with his parents, Matt's dad Michael nearly collapsed.

"He just pretty much doubled over when he heard that Matt was at Grade A, or on that road. And I'm trying to be calm and think, well, you know, we don't know anything yet. We don't know anything yet," Pam Sweets, Matt's mom, remembered.

That night, Pam and Michael Sweets were home watching the news when the TV flashed a number for families with people missing after the plane crash. Pam wrote it down. Michael was sure the answer would only break them. “No, we can’t go,” he said. “No, no,” she said. “We have to go.”

At the reunification center, Pam handed over a photo and the one detail she thought could identify her son. He had a shunt in his head. A staff member left the room and came back five minutes later.

“We know where your son is,” they told her. “He’s at University Hospital.”

“He’s alive,” Pam remembers saying. “Great!"

He was burned over 95 percent of his body, but he was wrapped in bandages, and he looked like Matt. His sisters arrived at midnight. “We were so scared,” Carrie said. “We were so comforted to see he looked like Matt. We didn’t know what we were gonna see.”

His family stayed with him for about 40 hours. They talked to him through the night. Brooke held his bandaged hand. At one point a doctor told her his lungs looked as good as hers, and Brooke held on to that. If the inside is good, she thought, we can fix the outside. Even if I have to live in this hospital for a year.

Around 8 the next morning, Carrie watched the numbers on a monitor start to drop.

She started to ask a nurse if what she was seeing was normal. A nurse turned around, and at the moment Matt flatlined. The room filled with people and crash carts. His family backed away and sat on the floor in the hall, where Brooke and Pam held each other, and Michael stood over them.

“I was just thinking over and over again,” Brooke said. “How am I going to tell my kids that their dad died?”

For 16 minutes they watched doctors work on him. Carrie couldn’t look into the room. She kept her head in her hands and listened to the doctors, her mother, and Brooke, and strangers she didn’t know held on to her. A doctor kept asking if they wanted to stop CPR. Michelle remembers begging in her head for it to be over.

Just as Michael nodded and said they had to call it, the monitor started beeping again.

“I have a pulse!” the nurse yelled. That was the last moment any of them felt hope.

After that, Matt’s body began to fail, and the family began to learn what the doctors already knew. His kidneys shut down. His body filled with fluid until his face was no longer his face. Michael found Matt’s specialist and asked whether he had a chance. He answered with tears in his eyes, Michael said: “Not in my experience with the amount of burns he’s had to his body.”

The family went to a quiet room to discuss what to do next. They weren't on the same page at first. Brooke was the last to be ready, and nobody in the family held it against her.

“I just knew that he was gonna live,” she said. “I couldn’t even imagine that he wasn’t gonna live. I can’t tell our kids their dad is dead.”

When she finally said yes, doctors stopped the medicines that were keeping Matt alive. Brooke stood at his head and pulled out her phone. She played a video of the four of them, her, Matt and their two kids, laughing and playing with a ball in their house. She held it by his ear, so he would hear his children’s voices as he left.

He took four breaths.

“I just stayed standing there, holding on to him,” Brooke said. “I was trying to be solid and calm for him, in case he could hear.”

The room had been full of family for two days. “There was a room full of people to send him off,” Michelle said.

Matt’s parents learned something that week they never expected. At the hospital, Michael said, a doctor asked if he wanted to know how Matt got there. Michael met a man named Adam Bowman, a supervisor at Grade A. When the explosions started and people ran, Bowman went after the burning, screaming man instead of saving himself. He carried Matt about 70 yards on his back to a flatbed truck and then rode with him until they found an ambulance.

A year later, the people who survived the UPS plane crash remember the day and the people who never left it

Four Grade A Auto Parts survivors open up about what they saw, who they carried, and the people who never made it home, one year after UPS Flight 2976. At 5:12 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, Ashley Muse shut down her computer. The last customer of the

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He and Adam still text. “He saved our boy’s life that night,” Michael said, “and gave us all a chance to say goodbye.”

Michelle keeps Matt’s ashes at home. Every day, she pours him a glass of water.

“It makes me feel better,” she told me.

By the time we turned to the scrapbook, the room had changed. It had gotten lighter. Family talked over each other about who was older (the twins, three minutes apart), about who got the bowl cuts (the girls, courtesy of their mom), and about the Velociraptor shirts. Michelle said Matt was “a big goofball, a big kid,” and the “other Type B child” in a family of Type A’s. When she needed shelves hung in her apartment, she paid him in steak sandwiches. His mother said that after a recent knee surgery, he encouraged her and took care of her, he told her, “We got to get up and walk. We need you.”

Brooke had written something down in advance, because she knew she’d go blank. She read it out loud.

“Matt was such a present, gentle, and devoted dad,” she read. “He wasn’t just raising them. He was teaching them how to be good people. One of the hardest parts of losing him is knowing that he should be here to keep doing that.”

So they look for Matt in other places.

When Brooke and the kids see a cardinal, they say, “There’s Daddy.” When they see a sunset, the kids say, “Daddy made that for us.” They send balloons up to him.

“The kids are so resilient,” Brooke said. “They’re so much stronger than we will ever be.”

Carrie said what the rest of them were feeling. “I just want people to know Matt for who he was,” she said, “and not for how he died.”

The family is bracing for November 4, when the footage will be back on every screen. Brooke dreads it. Matt’s young son, who just turned seven, can’t see a UPS truck without a meltdown. They are careful to say they don’t blame anyone. But the logo, the planes, the date are reminders that the whole city is grieving in public, and they’re grieving too.

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