LOS ANGELES — A motorist was arrested on murder charges after authorities say she slammed her SUV into a city bus in Los Angeles, killing at least two people and injuring six others in a prelude to a second deadly tragedy: the fiery crash of a TV news helicopter that was covering the collision. Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, of Simi Valley, was arrested Tuesday night and was being held at a Los Angeles jail with bail set at US$4 million, police said Wednesday. The case is under review by the district attorney’s office, which will decide whether to file the charges in court or pursue different ones. Information on a lawyer who could speak on her behalf was not immediately available. The helicopter, which was used by NBC and Telemundo, crashed about two hours after police say Rios drove her 2004 Ford Expedition the wrong way down a busy avenue, ran a red light and struck a vehicle before hitting the bus. One passenger was fully ejected from the bus and another was partially ejected, police said. Rios’ mother, Cindy Rios, said she was shocked and saddened by the string of events. She said she had not spoken to Bailee Lynn since her arrest and had not been contacted by law enforcement. “The fact that my daughter was involved and was the cause of it is just extremely disturbing,” Cindy Rios told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. “If anything, I’m sorry for the other families ... My daughter’s alive. People lost their lives.” The two people who died in the bus crash were identified as Daniel Castillo, 46, of Los Angeles, and Gage Weida, 31. No city was given for Weida, but according to his Facebook page, he also lived in L.A. Chopper crash killed a reporter, a pilot and a man on the ground NBC4 Los Angeles reported that two people aboard the helicopter -- reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw -- were killed when the chopper went down Tuesday in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. A person on the ground, identified as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, died in a parking lot. He was from Guatemala, the country’s consulate confirmed. The crash happened as news crews were reporting on the collision involving the SUV that slammed into the bus. There were no immediate details on what caused the helicopter crash, but an alarm could be heard sounding inside the helicopter’s cockpit as it lost altitude in the final seconds of video the crew broadcast before the crash. Just after the beeping noise starts, a woman’s voice says “uh oh.” The helicopter moves quickly away from the bus crash site and starts losing altitude. The woman says “You can’t pull up?” before the video stops as the chopper nears the ground. “That video is probably the most important evidence that we have discovered so far,” U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigator Fabian Salazar said Wednesday at a news briefing. Salazar said the sounds were consistent with the helicopter’s engine changing speed, as well as what he said were likely advisory tones for the pilot. The NTSB said it is also investigating the bus collision. The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350, went down near a large storage facility. At least four cars and two storage containers burned after the helicopter caught fire. Anchor and reporters pay tearful tributes to deceased colleagues Moreno was a familiar voice for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 during the station’s aerial coverage. She and Marciniw were both were employees of Angel City Air, which operated the chopper for the station. Moreno, born in Orange County, joined Angel City Air in 2010, the same year she earned a broadcast journalism and political science degree from Chapman University. She reported for several news outlets and began flying with Marciniw in 2023, the NBC4 website said. Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974. “I think a lot of us are still trying to process what happened, this terrible loss,” NBC4 reporter Lauren Coronado told viewers early Wednesday as she stood near the crash site. A hazmat crew was cleaning up jet fuel, she said. In a tribute to Moreno and Marciniw, the newscast referred to them as “the team in the sky,” saying Moreno often posted videos from her job and was in awe of the view. Anchor Lynette Romero held a colleague’s hand and wiped away tears after hearing Moreno’s voice when one of her posts was played. Jake Asner, who worked with Moreno in 2022 during a four-month internship, said she was a driven journalist. “She could be listening to six different scanners, be talking to the assignment desk, reporting in English and Spanish and controlling the camera, all at the same time,” said Asner, who helped start a memorial near Whiteman Airport, where the chopper was based. A friend of Marciniw, George Kapoyan, came to lay flowers. Kapoyan remembered him as “a gentle, humble giant” who took all the time he needed to conduct preflight safety checks and was very thorough when communicating with air traffic control. “You felt very comfortable flying with him,” Kapoyan said. Expert talks about what may have caused the crash Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said the alarm sounding in the helicopter’s final video sounds like the low rotor RPM warning horn that signals the main rotor is no longer spinning enough to keep the helicopter in the air. “It just has all the earmarks of a potential loss of engine power and a dangerous decrease in the main rotor speed,” said Guzzetti who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and FAA. Guzzetti said the pilot appeared to be trying to perform an emergency maneuver to use the wind to force the rotor to spin again much like a breeze turns a windmill. Doing that can create a bit of lift that could help cushion the impact, but Guzzetti said there would have been little opportunity to do that because the helicopter had been hovering at a low altitude beforehand. There are risks to news helicopters particularly in a major city like Los Angeles where multiple helicopters respond to an incident, but the pilots all coordinate closely over the radio to ensure they maintain a safe distance from each other. The industry also shares best practices to help keep these news flights safe. “It’s a very unique form of flying. And the community is very good about lessons learned,” Guzzetti said. Other crashes involving news helicopters The station said this is the second aviation tragedy in its history. In 1977, a KNBC news helicopter crashed when it ran out of fuel while returning to the station after covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara, killing the pilot and camera operator. There have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the U.S. since 2000, killing 16 people, according to a review of federal accident records and news accounts. They include a 2023 crash in a New Jersey forest that killed the pilot and a photographer aboard a helicopter used by Philadelphia station WPVI and a 2022 crash beside a Charlotte, North Carolina, interstate that killed a pilot and meteorologist during a training flight for WBTV. A 2007 midair collision in Phoenix of two TV news helicopters that were covering a police chase led the NTSB to recommend that news helicopters have at least two people in the cockpit so the pilot can focus on flying while the reporter focuses on the story. ___ Ashley Duong and Hallie Golden, The Associated Press Golden reported from Seattle.
