A witness has described erratic, swaying movements by an NBC4 helicopter moments before it crashed into a Los Angeles parking lot, killing all three people involved.
Zareh Sevanesian, who watched the aircraft’s final flight from the ground, told NBC4 that he immediately sensed trouble during Tuesday evening’s incident in Chatsworth. “Something didn’t look right,” he said. “And, I told my wife, that helicopter’s not flying right. It was swaying and all of the sudden it started losing altitude. It just kept getting lower and lower and lower and lower.”
The helicopter went down shortly before 7 p.m., claiming the lives of pilot George Marciniw and NBC4 and Telemundo 52 journalist Eliana Moreno. A pedestrian on the ground, 19-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, also died. Telemundo 52 later spoke with a man who identified himself as the victim’s cousin and said they were visiting from Guatemala.
Sevanesian said he eventually lost sight of NewsChopper4 behind buildings before seeing a massive burst of smoke and flames erupt from the parking lot of a storage business. “It was just this huge puff of smoke and fire,” he said. “It was just so hot and so on fire that I couldn’t approach it.”
The impact sparked an intense blaze, with four vehicles catching fire. Residents fled and took cover from flying debris. Sevanesian described the scene as “one of the most violent fires I have ever seen.” He recalled three people nearby “screaming uncontrollably” after witnessing the aftermath.
Marciniw and Moreno had been covering a separate deadly collision between a Metro bus and an SUV in Chatsworth, which had killed at least two people earlier Tuesday afternoon. The chopper took off from a nearby airport at about 5:20 p.m., roughly 20 minutes after the bus crash was reported. Its signal was lost just before 7 p.m.
A livestream from the helicopter captured its harrowing final moments, with a warning horn sounding as the aircraft appeared to struggle in the air. “Uh, oh,” Moreno could be heard saying as the alarm sounded.
The helicopter’s low rotor RPM annunciator horn blared for several seconds before it began losing altitude. “Pull,” Moreno said. “You can’t pull up?” The livestream then showed violent shaking before the warning sounded again and the feed cut out abruptly.
NBC4 anchor Colleen Williams opened the station’s 11 p.m. Newscast with word of the loss. “We are coming on the air with heavy hearts tonight because we lost valued friends and colleagues just before 7 p.m. News Chopper 4 crashed in Chatsworth while on assignment tonight,” she said.
NBC4 and Telemundo 52 said they were “deeply saddened” by the fatal crash and extended their condolences to the families, friends and colleagues of those killed. Investigators are still determining the cause of the crash.
