Three people were killed and one person was hospitalized Tuesday evening when NBC4 Los Angeles’s NewsChopper4 crashed and caught fire in a Chatsworth parking lot while covering a nearby deadly Metro bus collision.
The helicopter went down just before 7 p.m. in the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles Fire Department officials said four people were assessed at the scene: three were pronounced dead there, and a fourth was taken to a hospital in unknown condition. At least one of those killed was a pedestrian in the parking lot, Capt. Branden Silverman said.
Authorities believed the other two fatalities were aboard the aircraft, though the wreckage was so badly burned that crews said they would have to search the debris to confirm how many people had been on board and to identify the helicopter. The crash sparked a fire that damaged four vehicles and two shipping containers. No nearby buildings were burned.
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| Victims: Reporter Eliana Moreno, pilot George Marciniw |
The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration were expected to lead the investigation into the cause, which officials had not determined Tuesday night.
NBC4 news anchor Colleen Williams confirmed around 9 p.m. that the station’s Chopper 4 had crashed. She had earlier told viewers that the station had lost contact with its team in the air.
“We are going to take a couple of minutes to think about that, to process, and to regroup,” Williams said before the station ended its live coverage.
NBC Los Angeles later confirmed the aircraft was NewsChopper4, also used by Telemundo 52 and operated by Angel City Air. Several news helicopters had been flying over Chatsworth to cover an earlier crash about two hours and a short distance away, in which a passenger vehicle collided with a Los Angeles Metro bus on Nordhoff Street around 5:03 p.m. That collision killed two people and injured several others. Silverman had been briefing reporters at the bus scene when he saw a column of smoke from the helicopter crash and left immediately for the second site.