After Kasey Joyce Grelle died in a bus crash in Nicaragua on March 23, her family was plunged into a nightmare. A sudden death always brings complications, but Kasey’s involved international law and hospitals in Central America. Her older son was seriously injured in the same crash and had to be medevacked back to the U.S., where he spent days at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
It was, everyone agreed, exactly the kind of situation where Kasey would have been incredible.
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Kasey, 41, was many things: a magnetic businesswoman who’d started her own company, a wife, a mother of three, a sister who was incredibly close with her two younger brothers, a music lover, and a terrific friend. But more than anything, she was a problem solver—one who fought for the people she loved and was remarkably adept in a crisis. “She would just know exactly what to do,” says her longtime friend Genevieve Caffrey.
Kasey famously demonstrated that almost 10 years ago, when her husband, the musician Dave Grelle, was run down on South Grand Boulevard in 2016 by a driver who fled the scene. Kasey—eight months pregnant, suddenly the sole caregiver for the couple’s 2-year-old son and with a high-stress job to boot—not only helped Dave through years of rehabilitation, but personally tracked down footage of the crash and brought it to police, leading to the driver’s prosecution.
“She felt like, if we didn’t get some kind of justice for this, it would be hard for me to go about my life,” Dave recalls.
With multiple broken bones and injuries that would take years to overcome, Dave hated how helpless he felt. “There was just something that didn’t feel good about my wife having to do everything,” he acknowledges. “But in the long run, I learned that this is what she fucking loves to do. She wants to do it for her people. She will fight to the death for her family.”
He adds, “The whole walking-down-to-the-St.-Louis-police station with a PowerPoint presentation, showing these guys they don’t know how to do their job? That was the beginning of her being like, ‘I’m gonna help all my friends solve all their problems.’” He adds, “That was almost the beginning of Kasey the Superhero.”
A native of Omaha, Kasey moved to St. Louis to attend Washington University. After graduation, worked as a TV reporter in Missoula, Montana, before moving back to St. Louis for a job on air at KSDK. It was then that she met Dave at a concert at Off Broadway—and Caffrey recalls that Kasey was immediately smitten. “She was obsessed with him, giddy for him,” Caffrey says.
The feeling was mutual. “We hung out late at night, forever, like, just talking,” Dave recalls. “And I thought she was amazing. She used to say she was waiting forever for me to kiss her, but I liked her so much, I didn’t,” he says.
For their first date, he invited her to New Orleans for Jazz Fest. “And so the adventurer she is, was like, ‘Yeah, of course, and we’re getting a room together,’” Dave says, laughing. “So that was our first date. New Orleans. The rest is history.” Four years later, he proposed, complete with a New Orleans-style brass band and a king cake, hiding the baby so she’d get the right piece and, according to Mardi Gras legend, get to be queen for the day. “I got on my knee, and I said, ‘You’re queen for the day. I want you to be my queen for the rest of our lives. Will you marry me?’” When she said yes, the Funky Butt Brass Band came marching in.
In the years that followed there was Dave’s terrible accident and painful recovery, but there was also passionate love, three kids, and a beautiful house on one of the prettiest streets in the city—very intentionally the city, which Kasey refused to give up upon, even after the horror of a reckless driver, disinterested police, and a judge that gave the driver probation even though she’d fled the scene. “She was always trying to make St. Louis better,” Dave recalls.
Kasey almost went to Columbia for her MBA, but when she turned down the scholarship offered by WashU’s Olin School, they threw in even more money—and that deal, plus the life she and Dave had built, was too good to turn down. In time, she seemed to know just about everyone in town. She made friends everywhere because she was willing to be self-deprecating, and even vulnerable. “She did have so much figured out, but she would never say that she had it all together,” Caffrey recalls. “She was just very real.”
When Rachel Sinha and her family moved to St. Louis from San Francisco six years ago, she and Kasey met through New City School, where their kids attended, and immediately became fast friends, even booking a trip to Disney World with their combined six kids but without their husbands, which Kasey somehow managed to organize into fun. “She just brought the sparkle into everything,” Sinha says.
Kasey was also a force in her career, breaking into the world of investment and entrepreneurship after getting her MBA. She held roles at local venture capital firms SixThirty Ventures and Cultivation Capital before leading the digital media firm Quillt to a successful acquisition in 2022.
Then, alongside Jesse Pujji, Kasey co-founded Aux Insights, a global advisory firm focused on providing digital marketing solutions and due diligence for private equity investors and the companies in their portfolio. Pujji says Kasey “got so energized” by the concept of investigating a company’s digital marketing in search of any problem.
“She was a voracious learner,” he says. “She had never been a consultant, and I think she went from not knowing how to put together a deck of her consulting to managing a team of people doing this and being amazing at it in probably six to nine months.” Pujji says Kasey’s unique background with marketing and venture capital gave her a credibility few others possessed.
Mishelle Weinerman remembers cold-emailing Kasey when Aux Insights was only a few months old, and her surprise when Kasey quickly wrote back. Weinerman is now a product manager for the company. She says Kasey was one to move mountains; no ask was too big or question too small. “She was always pushing to get to a better result,” Weinerman says.
As Aux Insights’ leader, Weinerman says Kasey had a profound presence. She was never daunted by the power suit-wearing members of the New York private equity firms she met with.
“Kasey commanded the room,” Weinerman explains. “Even when she was just starting and she didn’t have anything that gave her the clout that she needed to sell to these huge private equity firms, she was able to show them what she was capable of and what was possible.”
When Weinerman asked Kasey the secret to her success, Kasey responded: “I just lead with my ideas. I just focus on the ideas and what I see and then everyone just follows.”
“She had a curiosity to just learn and understand the problems, and she gave off this feeling that she understood your problems. She understood how to solve them and she knew exactly what you needed,” Weinerman says.
Adds Pujji, “She connected with these folks, personally, in all kinds of ways. She was vulnerable. Every client she interacted with came away feeling inspired by her.”
Missy Glassmaker, who was Kasey’s boss at KSDK and later worked for Kasey at Quillt and became friends with her, says Kasey’s curiosity set her apart. “She wanted to know what was happening, why it was happening and how she could help,” Glassmaker says.
It’s one reason she was so good at networking; her attention never seemed transactional. She could look at people deeply and appreciate them fully. “She never had the ego that needed to feel like she was the smartest one in the room,” Glassmaker says. “She got her energy from surrounding herself with smart, talented people in life, not just business.”
As much as Kasey was a force propelling Aux forward, she never let it dominate her life, and she made sure of the same for those who worked there. Weinerman recalls Kasey stressing the importance of life outside of work, and she personally lived it, making time for family, friends, a good concert, and also herself. Even when Dave had late gigs and she’d stay up to say goodnight, she’d also get up early to walk—most days at 4:30 a.m. “She loved those hours in the morning,” Dave recalls. “That was how she recharged—without the kids, without me, without work, it was kind of her time, and she needed that, and she knew she needed that.”
Numerous friends recall how present she was for her kids after 5 p.m., not just ferrying them to their club soccer and water polo and more, but also as intensely interested in their lives as she was with her work. Says Sinha, “She was so focused on them that I don’t know how she also, in parallel, had this massive career, because from my perspective, she was just so focused on, ‘Are the kids alright?’”
For a few terrible days in March, the kids weren’t alright. Kasey was with the two older kids on an open-air safari-style bus inside their resort to go sand surfing when something went terribly wrong on a steep hill, and the bus crashed. (Dave, who has retained legal counsel, says he can’t talk about the accident.) Their oldest son was initially in critical condition; their daughter was wounded, but in much better shape. Kasey died that day.
It took more than two weeks for the news to hit social media, because Kasey’s friends kept their silence out of respect to her family. Her friends created an Excel sheet of “People Who Love Kasey” and needed to be kept in the loop; it rapidly grew to more than 500 names, including the mayor and various CEOs. And they enforced silence. Dave needed time to tell the kids even after the family was medevacked back to the U.S. Then they needed space to come to terms with what had happened. No one challenged that.
The weeks after Kasey’s death have come with proof that her faith in St. Louis was justified. The GoFundMe created by a former nanny has raised more than $360,000 for the Grelle children. The Meal Train set up by friends has every night covered for weeks.
“Everything I’ve had to do, the person I called was a friend,” Dave says. “It’s not like I was just calling an accounting firm or I was just calling an attorney. It was all people who loved us and were like, ‘Don’t worry, do what you have to do. We’ve got people.’”
Kasey’s closest friends came together in the days after her death. Some of them barely knew each other, but they were all determined to help. It only took a few moments of helplessness to remember that Kasey had written a 40-page manual for the family’s new au pair, which had detailed information on the day-to-day details of life. Beyond that, they knew her stance on everything from smartphones for kids (emphatically against) to which summer camps were good. “We realized, we know exactly what she wants,” Sinha says.
Even when they don’t, Kasey’s presence still lingers. She had a beautiful voice, low and charming and sometimes conspiratorial with fun. That voice is still in the hearts of her friends. As Sinha confesses, “I can still almost hear her, all the time, just sort of telling us what to do.” Her friends know they’d be foolish not to listen.
