Sisters Visiting Parents in Illinois Pass Away After Car Crash

December 21, 2020

A pair of sisters visiting their parents in Naperville, Illinois for the holidays died in a car crash in Ohio.

Holiday tragedy: Angel Yang, 29, and Cassidy Yang, 26, were driving from New York to their hometown in Illinois on Dec. 5 when the car accident happened, reports the Chicago Tribune.

In an interview with the Tribune, family friend Christine Zhang revealed that the Yang sisters were the only children of Chinese immigrants Zhongjin Yang and Jie Yao, who devoted their lives raising them.
Angel was born in 1991 while Zhongjin Yang was earning his Ph.D. from the University of Oslo in Oslo, Norway.
Cassidy, who was born in Nova Scotia, Canada in 1994, was 2 months old when the family moved to Naperville.
Zhongjin Yang, is a known physicist in Naperville, while the mom, Jie Yao, is a telecommunications engineer.
They wrote tributes to their daughters on a private memorial page, which contains dozens of photos and stories shared by friends.
At the end of their tribute to Angel and Cassidy, the parents celebrated the brilliance of their lives despite them being cut short, noting how proud they are of the women.

A tale of two sisters: Zhang, a local teacher who has known the Yang family for over two decades, shared that the sisters were both at the top of their class in “everything, anything they tried.”

Angel Yang, who double majored in physics and management science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a master’s degree at University of California, Berkeley, worked as a consultant in New York.
Meanwhile, Cassidy Yang double majored in physics and business economics and management at California Institute of Technology and was scheduled to complete her Ph.D. in quantitative and computational biology at Princeton in May 2021.
The sisters are remembered by friends and colleagues as hard-working, passionate women who were generous to others.
A GoFundMe page was set up by Zhang and Yang family friend Jiyong Zhao in Cassidy and Angel’s honor, initially to help the family with the funeral expenses.
The family, however, decided to use the donation to establish the Angel and Cassidy Foundation, which will fund education opportunities for girls and young women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.

Feature Image via GoFundMe

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