Kobe Bryant’s body, those of other crash victims ID’d
LOS ANGELES >> The bodies of Kobe Bryant and three other people killed when a helicopter smashed into a foggy Los Angeles-hillside have been identified, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Tuesday.
Fingerprints were used to confirm the identity of Bryant, 41, along with John Altobelli, 56; Sarah Chester, 45, and the pilot, 50-yearold Ara Zobayan, the Medical Examiner-Coroner reported.
While the department had not yet formally identified five other victims, relatives and acquaintances have identified them as Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter, Gianna; Sarah Chester’s 13-year-old daughter Payton; Altobelli’s wife, Keri, and daughter, Alyssa; and Christina Mauser, a girls’ basketball coach at a Southern California elementary school.
The last of the bodies and the wreckage were recovered from the Calabasas hillside on Tuesday, authorities said.
Determining what caused the crash will take months, federal investigators said at an afternoon news conference.
The helicopter descended for about a minute before crashing. It was traveling at more than 2,000 feet a minute when it hit the ground, “so we know that this was a high-energy impact crash,” but it appeared that the aircraft was in one piece when it struck the ground, the National Transportation Safety Board’s Jennifer Homendy said.
However, it is too soon to determine whether the pilot was still in control of the aircraft during that descent, she said.
The pilot was well-acquainted with the skies over Los Angeles and accustomed to flying celebrities.
Zobayan had spent thousands of hours ferrying passengers through one of the nation’s busiest air spaces and training students how to fly a helicopter. Friends and colleagues described him as skilled, cool and collected, the very qualities you want in a pilot.
His decision to proceed in deteriorating visibility, though, has experts and fellow pilots wondering if he flew beyond the boundaries of good judgment and whether pressure to get his superstar client where he wanted to go played a role in the crash.
Jerry Kidrick, a retired Army colonel who flew helicopters in Iraq and now teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, said there can be pressure to fly VIPs despite poor conditions, a situation he experienced when flying military brass in bad weather.
“The perceived pressure is, ‘Man, if I don’t go, they’re going to find somebody who will fly this thing,’ “Kidrick said.
The chartered Sikorsky S-76B plowed into a cloudshrouded hillside as the retired NBA star was on his way to a youth basketball basketball tournament in which Gianna was playing.. The last of the nine bodies was recovered Tuesday.
NTSB investigators have said Zobayan asked for and received permission from air traffic controllers to proceed in the fog. In his last radio transmission before the helicopter went down, he reported that he was climbing to avoid a cloud layer.
Investigators have yet to establish the cause of the crash and have not faulted his decision to press on or explained why he chose to do so.
Randy Waldman, a Los Angeles helicopter flight instructor who viewed tracking data of the flight’s path and saw a photo of the dense fog in the area at the time, speculated that Zobayan got disoriented in the clouds, a common danger for pilots.