Nearly two weeks after Kobe Bryant‘s fatal helicopter accident, Los Angeles county fire dispatchers have released audio of several 911 calls made by witnesses in the Calabasas, California, area the day of the crash.
The newly recovered calls, originally obtained by KTLA, revealed details of the scene on the morning of January 26, when the 41-year-old athlete died alongside his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven other people. Multiple onlookers describe foggy conditions that made it almost impossible to see the aircraft itself before flames broke out in the hills.
“I’m walking on a trail and I could hear this plane, as if it was in the clouds but couldn’t see it,” one caller told the fire department dispatcher. “Then we just heard a boom and a dead sound, and I could see the flames.”
The hiker continued to describe the fiery accident, explaining that “whatever crashed into the hill was also on fire.”
Another caller, who could see the crash from the Erewhon Market on Agoura Road in Calabasas, told the authorities that “a helicopter crashed into a mountain, I heard it and now I’m looking at the flames.” By the end of his conversation with the dispatcher, he said he could hear sirens as first responders were arriving to the scene.
A man on nearby Las Virgenes Road, near the Municipal Water District, said he “heard a helicopter go over” his head toward the southeast of his location. Due to the extremely thick fog, the witness admitted he could hardly see the helicopter but “heard a pop, and then it immediately stopped. “He later showed concern over the helicopter’s equipment and the mountains that were “obstructed in clouds.”
“I was just thinking to myself, if this guy doesn’t have night vision, he’s completely IFR,” he told the dispatcher, referring to the instrument flight rules that are essential for safe aviation.
The fifth call obtained by KTLA was made by a repeat caller who wanted to clarify the location of the crash after seeing the remaining smoke after the flames had partially cleared.
Bryant and his daughter were among nine people who boarded the chopper at John Wayne Airport in Los Angeles on January 26. The same morning, helicopters from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Air Support Division were grounded due to unsafe visibility. A spokesperson for the department told the Los Angeles Times shortly after the incident that “the weather situation did not meet our minimum standards for flying.”
As more details about the crash continue to emerge, Us Weekly confirmed that Gianna and the late Los Angeles Lakers player’s bodies were released by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office to the Bryant family on Saturday, February 2. Officials determined their cause of death as blunt force trauma.
Bryant and Gianna are survived by his wife and her mother, Vanessa Bryant, and the couple’s daughters Natalia, 17, Bianka, 3, and Capri, 7 months.
