Chilling onboard footage has captured Los Angeles photo journalist Eliana Moreno’s final words before the NBC news helicopter she was riding in plummeted to the ground.
Moreno, whose age was not reported, died Tuesday evening alongside pilot George Marciniw when the NewsChopper4 crashed near a fatal bus collision in the Chatsworth area of San Fernando Valley. The aircraft fell around 7pm, and a third person believed to be on the ground was also killed, while a fourth victim was rushed to hospital with serious injuries.
The helicopter had been hovering above the scene of an earlier crash where an SUV had collided with a city bus, killing two people and injuring six others. Several news helicopters were in the area covering that incident when something appeared to go wrong with the NBC4 aircraft.
Footage recorded from inside the chopper shows the camera beginning to violently shake before the view is pulled away as the helicopter rapidly loses altitude. The same recording captured Moreno’s haunting final question to the pilot.
“You can’t pull up?”
Ground footage shows the wreckage completely engulfed in flames as more than 50 firefighters rushed to battle the blaze. Local police confirmed in a statement that one person appeared to be outside the helicopter when it crashed and was declared deceased at the scene.
The crash became the focus of coverage after NBC4 anchors lost contact with their crew. Veteran host Colleen Williams was live on air when she received confirmation that the fallen aircraft belonged to the station.
“We can now confirm that the chopper that went down in Chatsworth tonight, about two hours ago, was in fact news chopper four,” she said emotionally.
“We’ve been telling you that we’ve been piecing it together here, we knew it was a news chopper and we knew we’d lost contact with our people out there, and we’ve just received the confirmation that in fact news chopper four went down just before seven o’clock tonight in Chatsworth.”
Williams continued: “We are going to take a couple of minutes to think about that, process it and regroup,” before the broadcast was abruptly cut.
The National Transport Safety Board is now investigating what caused the helicopter to rapidly lose altitude and fall from the sky. The FBI is also involved in the investigation, with a spokesperson stating that they are now allowing “the whole of person” to be considered before denying an application, though the connection to the crash investigation was not immediately clear.
The bus crash that originally drew news helicopters to the area left two dead and six injured. The NBC4 crew had been among several aerial news teams covering that scene when their aircraft went down, turning one tragedy into two and sending shockwaves through the Los Angeles news community.
The NTSB investigation into the cause of the helicopter crash is ongoing.