Bus crash and news helicopter crash kill five in one Los Angeles evening

Two unrelated disasters, less than two hours and less than two miles apart, killed five people in the Chatsworth neighborhood of Los Angeles on Tuesday evening, after a sport-utility vehicle slammed into a city bus and a television news helicopter sent to cover that crash went down and caught fire nearby.

The first collision happened just after 5 p.m., when a Ford Expedition traveling south on De Soto Avenue at what witnesses described as freeway speed ran a red light and struck the side of an eastbound Metro Line 166 bus, according to a Los Angeles Fire Department alert. The SUV ended up wedged into the bus's side. Two people died and six were taken to hospitals, some in critical condition, before firefighters and an urban search-and-rescue team finished extricating trapped passengers.

Roughly two hours later, at 6:57 p.m., a Eurocopter AS350 B2 flying overhead crashed between two commercial buildings a short distance away, at 9151 North Mason Avenue, and burst into flames. The aircraft, known on air as NewsChopper4, was owned and flown by Angel City Air under contract to NBC4 and its Spanish-language sister station, Telemundo 52, and had been circling the earlier crash scene to provide live aerial coverage, a practice common to Los Angeles television news.

The toll

Fire department records and statements from officials put the combined death count at five:

• Daniel Castillo, 46, and Gage Weida, 31, were killed in the bus collision at Nordhoff Street and De Soto Avenue.
• Pilot George Marciniw and aerial reporter Eliana Moreno died aboard the helicopter.
• Edy Gutierrez Mejia, 29, was killed on the ground when the aircraft crashed near his location.

A department alert on the bus crash logged eight patients total, six of them transported to local hospitals. A separate alert on the helicopter crash said 56 firefighters responded, extinguished the resulting fire and confirmed three people dead at the scene, with a fourth taken to a hospital. Four vehicles and two storage containers were damaged; no structures caught fire.

How the two crashes were linked

The bus crash alone would have been one of the deadlier Los Angeles traffic collisions of the year. Police say the Expedition's driver, identified as 36-year-old Bailee Lynn Rios of Simi Valley, was suspected of running the red light, driving recklessly and possibly driving under the influence when she hit the bus. Rios was hospitalized with injuries from the crash and, according to reporting on her arrest, was booked on suspicion of murder once she was released, with bail set at $2.03 million. Her case is expected to be forwarded to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office.

What turned a serious traffic crash into a broader tragedy was the response it drew from the sky. Several television stations, including NBC4 and Telemundo 52, sent helicopters to the intersection to feed live pictures back to newsrooms, a routine practice in a media market that has relied on aerial coverage of breaking news for decades. Video recorded from inside NewsChopper4 in the moments before it went down reportedly captured the sound of the engine losing power along with a cockpit alarm associated with declining main-rotor speed, according to multiple outlets that reviewed the footage. The National Transportation Safety Board has not confirmed what caused the loss of control, and cautioned that its work has only begun.

Who is affected

Moreno, a Chapman University graduate who had flown aerial coverage for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 for years and was known to viewers by the on-air nickname "Eli in the Heli," and Marciniw, a veteran pilot and Burbank High School graduate, were remembered by their station as colleagues who died "while they were doing their jobs," in Mayor Karen Bass's words. The crash also touches the family of Gutierrez Mejia, who had no connection to either crash scene before the helicopter came down near him, and the riders and families of the Line 166 bus, a route that runs through the San Fernando Valley. Rios's family and the families of Castillo and Weida are now separately entangled in a criminal case that could take months to resolve.

Los Angeles is one of the country's most helicopter-saturated news markets, with several stations operating their own aircraft or contracting with companies like Angel City Air, a division of Welk Aviation, to provide live coverage of freeway chases, fires and crashes almost daily. Trade publications that track civil aviation, including AVweb's initial accident report, confirmed within hours that the downed aircraft was the specific Eurocopter AS350 B2 operated by Angel City Air. Fatal crashes of news helicopters remain rare relative to the volume of hours those aircraft fly, but each one has historically prompted newsroom reviews of how closely aircraft are allowed to work near each other and near ground-level hazards such as power lines and buildings.

Reaction

Bass, addressing reporters after the second crash, tied the two events together in describing the scale of the evening's losses.

"This is a very, very tragic day in Los Angeles. We lost five Angelenos today, and my heart certainly goes out to the families and friends of all of those that we lost."

NBC4 and Telemundo 52 said in a statement that they were "deeply saddened" and extended condolences "to the families, friends and colleagues" of Moreno and Marciniw. Fire officials who worked the helicopter scene described a difficult recovery effort amid the wreckage and fire damage before victims could be confirmed.

What happens next

The National Transportation Safety Board, which leads investigations into civil aviation accidents nationwide, sent investigators to the Chatsworth crash site Wednesday morning to begin documenting wreckage, examining the helicopter's engine and instruments, and interviewing witnesses, with assistance from the Federal Aviation Administration. Agency investigations of this kind typically produce a brief preliminary report within about a month, followed by a final report on probable cause that can take a year or more, once flight-data and maintenance records are reviewed.

On the ground, Rios's criminal case moves forward separately in Los Angeles County courts, where prosecutors will decide what charges to formally file. The Los Angeles Police Department, which is leading that investigation, has asked anyone with information about the crash to come forward. Metro, which operates the Line 166 route, thanked the fire department and police for their response and offered condolences to the victims' families, while referring investigative questions to LAPD.

For now, Los Angeles television stations that regularly send helicopters to cover breaking news are left absorbing the loss of a widely recognized aerial team, even as the broader practice of flying multiple news helicopters over active emergency scenes is likely to draw renewed scrutiny once investigators determine what brought NewsChopper4 down.