Family loses small business in UPS plane crash

Denis and Arnela Kustric had previously built a life in Louisville.

Now they’re not sure how to do it again.

Kustric’s trucking business had only been running for two weeks when a plane crashed from the sky, destroying the semi-trailer truck.

They reported their business, Kustric Company LLC, to the state last July and recently began parking their new semis on Grade Lane.

On Nov. 4, while waiting to haul a load in Nashville, Denis called the dispatcher and the dispatcher told him to wait an hour.

An hour has passed. Still no load. He called the dispatcher and said he would return to Louisville empty-handed. This was the advantage of being your own boss. He could say no to a load that wouldn’t pay enough or would get him home too late.

He stopped in Elizabethtown and pumped $300 worth of gas before driving to a Louisville parking lot where he rented a spot on Grade Lane. He saw the property owner fixing his truck and said, ‘Hey, it’s almost 5pm. Let’s go home.’

Denis called his wife Arnela to say that he was tired and hungry. He had driven a lot between Indiana and Tennessee over the last two days. Whoever came home first started the coffee.

Arnela had placed the coffee in front of Denis when the owner of the parking lot called out: ‘Hey, did you see the picture?’

“I’ll check later,” he said, hungry and tired, aware that he had ignored the message on his phone.

“I’m sorry Denis, but there’s been a big accident,” said the car park owner. ‘Your trailer, your truck and everything is on fire.’

A UPS cargo plane loaded with hundreds of thousands of pounds of fuel and bound for Honolulu crashed on Grade Lane, just south of the runway at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, at approximately 5:15 p.m. State and local officials reported There are at least 13 dead and 15 injured in the disaster, and it is stated that the death toll may still increase. This is the deadliest plane crash in UPS Airlines history.

“We are grateful that he is alive and back home,” Arnela told The Courier Journal on November 6. “Everything we had built over the last three years — building this particular business for her to be on her own and work for her own company — everything was turned to ashes in one minute.”

That tractor was Denis’s life’s work. As a 17-year-old boy in the 1990s, he fled war-torn Bosnia and began distributing articles for The Courier Journal, saving money to build the American Dream.

Every day between 2am and 5am he walked the streets of the Highlands; He was throwing papers to the houses on one side of the street, and his father was throwing papers to the houses on the even sides.

“I travel miles on my legs, from New York to China,” Denis joked, his Bosnian accent still faintly audible. “And when it was Sunday, it was so heavy you could break the door down with paper.”

He married Arnela in 2004, and they joined him until they had their second son, after Arnela finished law school in Bosnia.

“Then we had to do something else while one was at school and the other was in diapers,” Arnela said.

When they were young in Bosnia, they were surrounded by death and destruction. They lost their homes. Their families. Too many families. They didn’t want this for their children. So Denis researched: What is the best job to make money in America right now?

Driving a truck.

In 2007, he applied for a dock job loading trailers for FedEx and found a job earning about $22,000 a year. Then one day, the opportunity to become a truck driver came along. FedEx would pay for everything. He passed his CDL and all six endorsements.

“There is hazardous material and I can pull double-triple tankers,” he said. “I love trucking.”

Then one day while he was working on his truck, a radiator fan nearly cut his fingers. He was taken to UofL’s hand clinic, where a doctor inserted metal rods into the fingers of his left hand. Later, he could no longer grasp anything heavy because he could not curl his fingers into a fist. That’s why he started his own business.

Arnela works as a registrar at Seneca High School. Working in public schools enabled them to have health insurance and a good education for their two boys: Adin, a freshman studying business at Bellarmine, and Kenan, an eighth-grader.

They bought the truck in November 2024 and had rented a trailer for the last year, but renting the trailer was expensive. Three weeks ago they went to the bank to get a $40,000 personal loan to buy their own caravan, parked on Grade Lane.

Now, the Kustrics’ American dream — a mortgaged home, a son at Bellarmine, another at JCPS — has turned into a nightmare, made worse by a recently handed-down Jefferson County tax bill.

Even though they have already filed a claim with their insurance, the process has not started yet. The insurance company needs photos of the ash-covered trailer. They told Denis that anyone could claim that their trailer was destroyed in a plane crash. But as long as the NTSB investigates, Kustrics probably won’t be able to reach the site. They already tried. Twice.

“I saved every penny to buy the truck and now I’ve lost it,” he said. “It’s really hard. When I bought the truck, it was cheaper. It was election time. Now the same truck costs $80,000.”

The Freightliner truck is manufactured in Mexico and the tariffs have doubled the cost, he said.

It’s a sentiment they’ve heard from many small business owners operating just south of Ali airport. And none of them are sure where to turn for answers.

“I wish only my tractor had hit, no one else and no one had died,” Denis said.

Arnela looks at him. He knows that if he had left Nashville 15 minutes later, or even 30 minutes, he wouldn’t be with her on the couch in this beautiful home, where there’s no looming mortgage and two growing boys sitting on the floor listening to their parents tell yet another family story about a heartbreaking loss.

“This doesn’t compare to losing someone’s life,” he said. “We are together. We will rebuild our lives.”

S.tephanie Kuzydym is a corporate and investigative sports reporter. reach out to him skuzydym@courier-journal.com or on social media @stephkuzy.

This article first appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal: UPS plane crash causes Louisville family to lose small business