“The helicopter just crashed!” a voice in the crowd yelled, drawing eyes away from the splayed-out wreckage of a bus collision that claimed two lives.
Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Brandon Silverman looked behind him to find a large plume of black smoke rising from a parking lot one block east. His team, which had just gruelingly removed passengers stuck between scraps of metal and glass, turned its attention to another deadly disaster Tuesday night.
Earlier in the evening, two bus passengers, Gage Weida, 31, and Daniel Castillo, 46, were killed when an SUV plowed into a bus in the suburban Los Angeles neighborhood of Chatsworth, officials said.
What authorities called a “preventable” tragedy – a woman allegedly driving under the influence ramming into a metro bus filled with passengers returning home from work – led to a domino effect, permanently altering the course of three more families’ lives.
Just two hours after the bus collision, a news helicopter for KNBC-TV NBC4 and KVEA-TV providing aerial coverage of the accident crashed and ignited a blaze, killing aerial photojournalist-reporter Eliana Moreno, pilot George Marciniw and Edy Gutierrez Mejia, a young tourist on the ground.
A loud explosion added fresh horror to the scene of the bus collision before first responders with the fire and police departments and news crews, including NBC4, quickly redirected their efforts to the inferno.
“To have two incidents of that significance in that short amount of time within a few blocks of each other is definitely a unique situation for any department,” Silverman told CNN.
Now, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are trying to determine what caused the news helicopter to go down, pointing to a video taken as the aircraft descended as a critical piece of evidence.
Meanwhile, the driver involved in the bus collision, Bailee Lynn Rios, faces a possible maximum sentence of life in prison after being charged with second-degree murder, driving under the influence and reckless driving, according to Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman.
“People on that bus at about 5 p.m. were either going to work or maybe coming from work. They might be going to get a bite to eat, to see family or friends,” Hochman said at a Thursday news conference. “What they did not expect is what was about to happen.”
Five lives were ended by the tragic sequence of events, leaving the community shaken and loved ones grieving: a father of four, an LA resident with an upcoming birthday, a Guatemalan tourist who recently landed in LA, an engaged reporter and a soon-to-retire veteran pilot.
The heavy emotional toll on their families, first responders and the broadcast news community has prompted outpourings of grief from city and state leaders.
“My heart is with the families whose lives changed forever Tuesday night. Simply going to work, coming from work to come back to your family, you expect to see them,” Mayor Karen Bass said at a vigil Thursday. “And they never arrive.”
Los Angeles Mayor: “Coming from work to come back to your family, you expect to see them and they never arrive”
The dual tragedies on Tuesday evening unfolded in rapid succession.
Around 5 p.m., the Los Angeles Fire Department arrived at a chilling scene: an SUV lodged almost fully inside an LA Metro bus. Some people were trapped inside vehicles, while another was tossed out into an intersection.
Rios, driving a Ford Expedition, ran a red light and nearly struck another car before crashing into the bus as it traveled east, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Rios was allegedly impaired by drugs and had narcotics inside the SUV as she drove “well beyond the speed limit,” Hochman said.
“She entered into opposing traffic because she was approaching a red light where cars were stopped, and she didn’t stop,” Hochman said. “At full force, she plunged into that metro bus.”
CNN has reached out to her attorney for comment.
Harms of driving under the influence to the victims and their families “cannot be compensated,” DA Hochman said September 17.
The bus driver, who had been injured in the wreck, quickly called the bus operating division for help, said Stephanie Wiggins, CEO of the LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Paramedics pronounced Weida and Castillo dead at the site of the collision. The fire department’s search and rescue team cut part of a car door away to rescue Rios while her SUV was still lodged in the bus, Silverman recounted.
After a trapped bus passenger and the SUV driver were rescued from the vehicles using hydraulic tools like the Jaws of Life and reciprocating saws, they were rushed to the hospital, according to Silverman. Four others had non-life-threatening injuries.
NBC4’s Moreno reported on television from a helicopter flying above the scene: “This is a horrific crash here in Chatsworth.”
A little over an hour after first responders flocked to the bus crash site, Silverman arrived. He stood in front of a group of reporters to provide an update on the bus collision, then waited to do a live interview with NBC4 reporter Robert Kovacik at 7 p.m. at the scene.
By that point, the group of 56 personnel from the fire department had mostly cleared the scene. Silverman was the only crew member still there, along with a rescue ambulance crew completing paperwork for the victims. Several LAPD officers were nearby for traffic and crowd control.
The dust had seemed to settle: Some in the large crowd gathered at the scene pulled out their phones to livestream while others stood there to process the shock or search for loved ones, according to Silverman.
But at 6:57 p.m., Silverman was alerted about the helicopter by someone in the crowd.
“That’s when I and the rescue ambulance that were on scene … they reported it to our dispatch center immediately over the radio and we both responded over to that incident,” he said.
Silverman jumped into his white Durango trying to find the crash, as the exact location was still unknown.
When 7 p.m. came, NBC4 anchors Colleen Williams and Jonathan Gonzalez reported a thick black plume of smoke near the bus accident site, saying, “We’re not sure what this is,” adding, “All we can tell you is something has happened out there.”
Williams and Gonzalez asked Kovacik about the smoke as he reported at the bus collision scene, and he responded, “I don’t think it’s anything related.”
Kovacik, who suddenly saw people running to see what happened, later drove swiftly to the source of the smoke.
Moments before the aircraft fell to the ground less than a mile away, sounds of the engine changing speed and alerts to the pilot could be heard on video, NTSB investigator-in-charge Fabian Salazar said at a Wednesday news conference.
In the live feed from the helicopter, a person is heard exclaiming something in the background before another voice is heard asking, “You can’t pull up?”
A loud buzzing noise is then heard before the feed shakes intensely and the chopper appears to descend rapidly. It hit a shipping container on its descent, according to Silverman.
A news helicopter crashed in Los Angeles, killing three, including a reporter and the pilot.
Within minutes, Silverman and the ambulance arrived at a storage facility parking lot behind a large one-story commercial building to find LAPD officers grabbing fire extinguishers and dragging a man away from the burning wreckage.
The ambulance crew started administering first aid to the victim, later identified as Mejia, but could not save him.
Meanwhile, Silverman searched for more victims inside the helicopter, which had burst into flames, and in the surrounding parked cars, igniting because the helicopter’s jet fuel leaked.
The blaze seemed unmanageable: Fire extinguishers from both the police and the fire departments “couldn’t even put a dent in the flames that were coming from the helicopter,” Silverman said.
When fire department crews got there minutes later, they immediately started attacking the fire and protecting the cars and the building near the blaze. They searched inside the building to ensure the fire had not spread there, according to Silverman. Four cars and two storage containers were damaged by the inferno, the fire department said.
A group of 67 firefighters knocked down most of the fire quickly and stopped the jet fuel from leaking further, Silverman said. Then, they searched through the helicopter wreckage to find victims on board.
As the news of the helicopter crash spread, media crews from the bus accident scene began rushing to the helicopter site and were told by law enforcement to evacuate because the situation was too dangerous, NBC4 footage showed.
Kovacik, the NBC4 anchor, heard it may have been a news chopper and saw a reporter from another station in tears, he said on air. Kovacik is heard checking in with colleagues, saying, “Are you OK? It’s not you guys, is it?”
The close-knit Southern California news community held its breath as it waited to hear which of its outlets would now be the subject of their reporting.
NBC4’s anchors told viewers the station lost contact with its helicopter crew. All the other stations told Kovacik it was not their chopper, he said. But as he realized it may have been his colleagues in the helicopter, Kovacik could be heard holding back tears.
Kovacik shakily asked Silverman who the helicopter belonged to. Silverman tells him he did not have that information.
“It soon became apparent through the news organizations … word started to travel whose helicopter it was, and it turned out to be NBC’s,” Silverman said.
Pilots and tower controllers also began deducing the downed helicopter belonged to NBC4.
“TV 4 is not up here with us. We believe it’s TV 4 that went down,” one pilot is heard saying, according to air traffic control audio obtained by CNN.
Around 9 p.m., Williams delivered the news to NBC4 viewers, her voice audibly distressed.
“We can now confirm that the chopper that went down in Chastworth tonight, about two hours ago, was in fact News Chopper 4,” Williams said.
The team had lost two fixtures of the station: Moreno, who was providing updates earlier on the bus accident, and pilot Marciniw.
“We are going to take a couple of minutes to think about that, to process and to regroup,” Williams told viewers. The station temporarily switched to other programming.
On the ground, it quickly became “an emotional scene,” Silverman recounted.
“It reminded me of an incident where a firefighter is severely injured or killed in the line of duty … and normally the members of the media are giving us their condolences,” Silverman said. “In this case, it was the other way around.”
Later that night, Mayor Bass visited the crash site.
“This is a very, very, very tragic day in Los Angeles,” Bass said. “We lost five Angelenos today.”
The next morning, NBC4 anchors tried to make sense of the tragedy: “So many of us are still waking up in disbelief. It’s hard to process this,” anchor Annabelle Sedano said.
On Thursday night, Bass and Los Angeles City Councilmember John Lee honored the five Los Angeles residents at a vigil.
“May we remember Daniel, Gage, Eliana, George and Edy for how they lived, for the people they loved and for the lives they touched,” Lee said.
Those who died are remembered “not simply as victims but as people deeply loved,” Los Angeles Councilmember John Lee said.
Weida, a passenger on the bus, was planning to celebrate his 32nd birthday with his family this Saturday.
“Instead, they’re not going to be coming out for his birthday, they’ll be coming out for his funeral,” Hochman said Thursday.
Another bus passenger, Castillo, was a devoted father of four “who had a way of bringing laughter and light into every room he walked into,” his daughter Johaunna Castillo said on a GoFundMe page for the family.
On the helicopter, bilingual journalist Moreno, 38, was passionate about telling the stories of Southern California from the sky. Her colleague, Marciniw, had decades of experience as a pilot and is remembered for “his kindness and warm smile,” Lee said.
Mejia, 29, a pedestrian, had been visiting LA from Cuilapa, Guatemala.
The back-to-back disasters in Chatsworth have left the Los Angeles community completely shaken. It is incredibly rare for a neighborhood to experience two fatal, high-profile accidents in a span of just two hours, Silverman said.
“Individually they were tragic events, and combined, I think it’s even more of a shock to community members,” Silverman said.
The suspect in the Chatsworth bus crash arrives on a stretcher to a Los Angeles courthouse on September 18.
As the LA community mourns the losses, the LAPD is investigating the bus collision and the NTSB and the FAA were at the scene piecing together evidence and conducting witness interviews about the helicopter crash.
“In gathering that factual data, we’ll be able to paint a better picture of the actual accident sequence,” Salazar of the NTSB said.
A preliminary report on the chopper crash is expected in 30 days, followed by a final report detailing probable cause, which can take up to 18 months, according to the NTSB.
Rios, the SUV driver who had been receiving treatment for her injuries, was wheeled into court on a stretcher Friday, video shows. The judge said she was not medically fit for arraignment, according to KTLA-TV. Her bail was set at $4.1 million and she is scheduled to appear in court on Monday, according to court records.
“It’ll be a long road ahead for people to recover from this,” Silverman said.
