Add The California Post on Google A witness has revealed the bizarre movements of an NBC helicopter moments before it lost altitude and plunged into a Los Angeles parking lot—killing both onboard and a person on the ground.
“Something didn’t look right,” witness Zareh Sevanesian told NBC4 after Tuesday evening’s horror crash in Chatsworth.
“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.”
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 helicopter went down shortly before 7 p.m., killing pilot George Marciniw and NBC4 and Telemundo 52 journalist Eliana Moreno. A pedestrian on the ground, who was named Wednesday morning as Edy Gutierrez Mejia, 19, also died.
Telemundo 52 spoke with a man who identified himself as the victim’s cousin and said they were visiting from Guatemala.
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.
The impact sparked an intense blaze, with four vehicles catching fire. Residents fled and took cover from flying debris.
“It was one of the most violent fires I have ever seen,” Sevanesian said.
He recalled three people nearby “screaming uncontrollably” after witnessing the aftermath.
“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,” NBC4 anchor Colleen Williams said as she opened the station’s 11 p.m. newscast.
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.
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