A murder case from a deadly Los Angeles bus crash became a second catastrophe when the news helicopter covering the wreck fell out of the sky nearby and killed three more people.
Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, was charged with murder Wednesday morning after police said an SUV collided with a Metro Line 166 bus Tuesday evening, leaving Gage Weida, 31, and Daniel Castillo, 46, dead.
The bus was hit around 5 p.m., after witnesses claimed the SUV ran a red light and came in at “freeway speed.”
Rios remained jailed Wednesday afternoon on $4.03 million bail, according to jail records, while police continued testing a possible DUI and investigated suspected reckless driving and the red-light allegation.
The Los Angeles Police Department said the case remained open and would soon be sent to the district attorney.
One of the two dead bus passengers was reportedly thrown from the vehicle. The other was said to have still been aboard.
A third person from the bus crash, 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, was identified Wednesday. Fire Capt. Branden Silverman had earlier described that victim as someone who appeared to have been on the ground as a pedestrian.
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Six commuters survived with injuries, and some were critically hurt.
Rescuers from an LA Urban Search and Rescue Team were seen working victims out of the mangled vehicle. One person had been pinned beneath it before crews freed her and rushed her into an ambulance with injuries described at the scene as “crushing.”
The helicopter disaster that followed turned the crash coverage into a live nightmare for NBC Los Angeles.
Robert Kovacik was still on the bus-crash assignment when the NBC 4 studio noticed smoke rising in the distance and ordered him toward it.
“Robert, we need you to move,” an anchor told him. “Robert, we’re going to need you to move towards that smoke and get closer to that scene immediately.”
The station had not yet confirmed what was burning.
“We understand there may be an aircraft down. We don’t have any more specific information than that,” anchor Colleen Williams told viewers as Kovacik headed that way.
Kovacik arrived at a line of first responders as black smoke rose ahead of him and the fear began forming that the aircraft could be connected to his own newsroom.
“Trust me, I am putting my own life in my own hands,” he told the firefighters and police keeping him back.
Then the possibility became personal.
“Dude, that’s my crew in there, that is my own crew,” Kovacik said.
A police officer told him no one could safely get closer.
“We are gonna get them evacuated. This isn’t safe,” the officer said.
Kovacik was still trying to determine whether the flames involved a helicopter and whether it belonged to a news crew.
Fox 11 reporter Ed Laskos put his arms around Kovacik and told him it was “a media chopper.”
“It’s a chopper?” Kovacik asked.
“Yes, it’s a media chopper,” Laskos said.
This video posted by @TheDeskDotNet is some of the most raw reporting you'll ever see on live TV. Here's the context:
NBC L.A. reporter Robert Kovacik was standing in front of the bus crash at 7:01 p.m. when an anchor interrupted and told him to head toward a smoke plume… https://t.co/aOmUrV9lCk
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 16, 2026
Kovacik immediately asked whether Laskos’ own crew was safe.
“Are you ok? It’s not you guys, is it?” he asked as flames erupted behind them.
A female reporter then ran past the cameras crying.
Kovacik told viewers that crews had not yet pinned down which outlet the aircraft belonged to.
“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.
NBC later learned the burning aircraft was NewsChopper4.
“We knew it was a news chopper, we knew we’d lost contact with our people out there, and we’ve just received the confirmation that, in fact, NewsChopper4 went down just before 7 o’clock tonight in Chatsworth,” Williams said on air Tuesday night.
Williams’ voice turned emotional as she told viewers the station needed a moment.
“We’re going to take a couple of minutes to think about that, to process and to regroup,” she said.
NBC Los Angeles reporter Eliana Moreno, 38, and pilot George Marciniw, 70, were killed, along with a third person on the ground who had not yet been identified.
The aircraft had been filming over the Chatsworth area of the San Fernando Valley before it fell into a parking lot near a self-storage facility, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department and NBC Los Angeles ground video.
NewsChopper4 had been near Nordhoff Street and DeSoto Avenue, between two warehouses and close to the earlier bus wreck, when it suddenly dropped.
The helicopter came down near two shipping containers and several parked vehicles, sparking flames that endangered four nearby vehicles.
Silverman told reporters the aircraft was “pretty well destroyed.”
The final cockpit audio captured Marciniw saying “uh oh” before Moreno asked, “You can’t pull up?”
Those last recorded moments became a major piece of the federal investigation.
At a Wednesday news conference near the Chatsworth crash site, National Transportation Safety Board Investigator-in-Charge Fabian Salazar said the recording included sounds that matched engine-speed changes and cockpit tones likely meant to alert the pilot.
“The video is probably the most important piece of evidence that we have discovered so far,” Salazar said. “What we want to do is get a pristine copy of that recording and send it to our recorder’s lab for a sound spectrum analysis.”
Salazar said investigators were already hearing key sounds on the recording.
“We are clearly hearing sounds that are consistent with the engine changing its speed, and we’re also hearing tones that are being generated that are likely advisories to the pilot.”
