Caitlyn Jenner couldn’t contain her emotions on Thursday as she shared her grief over her good friend Sophia Hutchins’ death weeks earlier.
During her appearance on Fox News At Night, the 75-year-old Olympic gold medallist was reduced to tears as she admitted that Hutchins’ tragic death in an ATV crash on July 2 had ‘hit [her] hard.’
Jenner went on to compare her heartbreak to the intense sorrow that the parents of the two children slain in a school shooting at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Wednesday must be feeling.
‘Just recently my good friend Sophia passed away in a tragic accident,’ a visibly emotional Jenner said. ‘But for the last seven weeks, I’ve been dealing with death, and it’s so difficult.’
‘Here I am dealing with my grief, and I just can’t even imagine parents who dropped their kid off at school and, like that father just said, “I’ll never get a chance to talk to him again.” That is just so horrible,’ Jenner said as her voice croaked and tears welled up in her eyes.
‘I’ve been dealing with grief, and these people have a long road ahead of them, and they’re going to be dealing with grief also.’
Jenner — who opened up to the Daily Mail about her grief just days after Hutchins was killed — was fittingly dressed in mournful black for the television appearance.
Hutchins was killed after she ran her ATV off a road near Jenner’s Malibu home and plummeted into a 350-foot ravine.
Emergency responders who were forced to rappel down the side of the cliff to reach the crashed vehicle pronounced Hutchins dead at the scene.
Investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department determined within days of the crash that speed had been a factor in the former Trump campaign surrogate’s death.
Hutchins allegedly hit the bumper of a car in front of her, which set the deadly crash in motion.
While speaking to the Daily Mail, Sgt. Eduardo Saucedo of the LASD stated: ‘It looks like she may have been speeding and rear-ended the other car, the other party, and then that caused her to veer to the right and go off the cliff.’
He added that, ‘It doesn’t seem like she was following them. I think she just she came up on them and then hit the car.’
The vehicle, a gray 2016 Mazda 6, reportedly had two women driving in it at the time.
‘So it looked like she tried to maneuver to go around it, but she was going too fast and just ended up clipping the rear end of that Mazda, causing her to veer off and go off the cliff there.’
The two women in the Mazda were unharmed in the initial crash, and they waited at the scene of the crash to speak with police.
Saucedo revealed the driver was a realtor in the area who had been showing a house nearby.
Saucedo also explained that Hutchins’ damaged ATV was left in the ravine because the ‘tow company didn’t have a line that was long enough to attach it and pull it up.’
The spot that Hutchins’ vehicle landed in was apparently where multiple previous accidents had occurred, and her ATV landed atop another vehicle that was left upside down and rusted out from an earlier crash.
Hutchins— who, like Jenner, was transgender — was introduced to the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star in 2015, when Hutchins was still presenting as a man.
Hutchins said that watching Jenner’s transition play out in public helped her to feel confident enough to start her own gender transition.
The two became close friends in 2017, and they later made their first public appearance together in 2018.
At the time, Jenner and Hutchins were rumored to be dating, but the two remained reticent about their potential relationship status.
Then, in a 2019 interview with the New York Times, Hutchins said she and Jenner were ‘never romantically involved.’
She suggested the rumors gained so much traction ‘Because we weren’t addressing it.‘
However, Hutchins added: ‘I don’t feel a need to address my sex life, quite frankly, unless I want to.’