A TV reporter was live on air when an NBC news helicopter plummeted from the sky and burst into flames, killing two of his colleagues and an unnamed civilian on the ground.
As per reports, NBC 4 journalist Robert Kovacik was on the scene in Los Angeles’ Chatsworth neighborhood on Tuesday, September 15, to cover a public commuter bus crash that had occurred earlier in the day.
At 7pm local time, a news helicopter also covering that crash suddenly fell from the sky, killing Eliana Moreno, a photo journalist employed by NBC 4, pilot George Marciniw, and an unnamed pedestrian.
Kovacik, however, was live on TV, and was completely unaware that the victims were people he knew. Firefighters asked him to vacate the area as smoke from the wreckage billowed into the sky.
“We don’t know where the chopper is from, we don’t know if it even is a chopper, if it’s a news chopper, we are just looking right now,” he said.
Yet as the commotion unfolded and vans from his network were evacuated, Kovacik ultimately began to realize that his colleagues had been in the downed helicopter.
“Dude that’s my crew in there, that is my own crew,” Kovacik pleaded with police, according to the Mail Online.
An officer replied: “We are gonna get them evacuated, this isn’t safe.”
Meanwhile, NBC Los Angeles anchor Colleen Williams shared live from the studio that they had “lost contact” with their news chopper. She later confirmed it had gone down.
“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.
“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.”
During a late-night news conference, Fire Battalion Chief Rico A. Gross said three people were dead at the scene while two others were taken to hospital. Officials did not reveal their conditions to the public.
Fire Capt. Branden Silverman added that one of the deceased was a pedestrian on the ground when the crash happened.
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