LOS ANGELES, CA — A helicopter crashed Tuesday in Los Angeles and killed at least three people in a parking lot, officials said, only hours after a separate deadly bus collision unfolded nearby. The Los Angeles Fire Department said one other person was taken to a hospital, but that person’s condition was not immediately clear.
Fire officials also said it was not immediately known whether everyone killed in the helicopter crash had been aboard the aircraft. At least one victim was found outside in the parking lot, according to Capt. Branden Silverman, a fire department spokesperson who briefed reporters at the scene.
Firefighters found the helicopter badly damaged in a parking lot beside parked vehicles
Silverman said the helicopter came down in a parking lot and struck, or landed right next to, parked vehicles. The lot serves a large one-story building, though officials said they had not yet identified what kind of business operates there.
The helicopter was described as “pretty well destroyed,” and Silverman said crews would have to search through the debris to learn how many victims were on board. Officials said more than 50 firefighters responded to the scene, showing the scale of the emergency response.
The crash also damaged four vehicles and two storage containers before the fire was brought under control. By Tuesday evening, officials said the fire had been extinguished.
Officials still do not know how many victims were inside the aircraft
Investigators were still working to separate who had been in the helicopter from who may have been nearby when it crashed. Silverman said crews were trying to determine the number of people inside the aircraft at the time of impact.
That uncertainty left open several basic questions about the crash scene. Fire officials said one of the dead was outside in the parking lot, but they did not immediately say whether any survivors had been in the helicopter or in nearby vehicles.
The presence of a victim outside the aircraft suggests the crash affected more than just the people on board. Officials have not released names, ages, or any information about the helicopter’s flight path.
NTSB and FAA are taking over the helicopter probe
The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration will handle the investigation into the helicopter crash. Those agencies regularly lead major aviation inquiries and will be looking at what happened in the moments before impact.
At this point, officials have not said what caused the helicopter to go down. They also have not identified the type of aircraft, where it had been headed, or whether weather, mechanical trouble, or pilot error may have played a role.
For now, the scene is focused on recovery and evidence gathering. Fire crews and federal investigators are expected to sort through the wreckage to determine how many people were inside and how the crash unfolded.
The helicopter crash came after another deadly wreck involving an SUV and city bus
The helicopter emergency came on the same day Los Angeles officials were already dealing with a separate fatal crash involving a city bus. Earlier Tuesday, an SUV slammed into an MTA bus, killing two people and injuring six others, officials said.
Photos and videos posted online showed about half of the SUV lodged into the side of the bus, while a large group of firefighters worked around the collision. The images underscored how severe the impact was and how quickly responders were called to the scene.
The two crashes were not reported as connected, but together they put multiple emergency teams to work across the city in a short span of time. Officials did not say how close the two scenes were to one another in operational terms, beyond describing them as near each other.
Los Angeles responders faced a heavy day of emergency calls and scene control
Between the helicopter wreck and the bus collision, firefighters, investigators, and other responders were pushed into a long and complicated day. The helicopter scene alone required more than 50 firefighters, a large enough response to manage fire, debris, and the search for victims at the same time.
By evening, the fire at the helicopter crash site had been put out, but the larger questions remained. Officials still had not explained the cause of either crash, and no information had been released about the people killed in the helicopter incident.
With the NTSB and FAA taking over the aviation probe, the focus now shifts to evidence, wreckage, and reconstruction of the final moments before impact. The fire department’s early account makes clear only the scale of the destruction, not the reason it happened.
