A news reporter was fighting back tears live on air as he reported on a helicopter crash that killed his co-workers.
Photojournalist Eliana Moreno and chopper pilot George Marciniw were named as two of the three victims who died when their NBC 4 aircraft went down in Chatsworth, Los Angeles, on Tuesday.
They had been reporting on a bus crash that had killed two people just blocks away when the studio lost contact with them, and it fell to the rest of the station’s team—including longtime reporter Robert Kovacik—to cover the death of their friends in real time.
He was on the ground as news teams scrambled for information about which network’s helicopter had gone down, as emergency services worked to contain the blaze that had broken out in an industrial lot after the crash. The impact had also smashed a car and a storage container.
Veteran reporter Kovacik fought back tears as he spoke to the studio after the incident, while anchors Colleen Williams and Carolyn Johnson discussed the moments when he had been part of the melee, trying to figure out what had happened.
“All of our colleagues didn’t know at first, and it is remarkable how people come together,” he said, night having fallen behind him. “You know, in our business, there’s a police tape and media’s on one side of the police tape and the first responders are on the other side of the police tape. You never want to be on that side of the police tape. And tonight, they asked me to cross that police tape and talk to them. That was tough. That was tough.”
In other footage, he was pictured on the other side of that tape, sitting in the front seat of an LAPD squad car with tears in his eyes.
In the first moments after the crash, Kovacik was on the ground, reporting live, speaking to other reporters and trying to determine whether it had been a news helicopter and, if so, which station’s.
“We don’t know where the chopper is from,” he said from the scene. “We don’t know if it even is a chopper. We don’t know if it’s a news chopper. We are just looking right now.
“We don’t know where it’s from. You know, this is the situation. We are just giving you the information just as we have it.”
During its coverage, NBC 4 revealed prior to confirmation that it knew that the death toll in the helicopter crash was three people, and that it couldn’t reach its crew.
“We don’t know the names of people. We just know it’s a television news helicopter. We can’t reach our crew, so we are making that assumption, and so it is deeply troubling, one reporter said live during the station’s extensive coverage.
During the broadcast, its journalists were visibly affected by what had happened.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” said weekend evening co-anchor Jonathan Gonzalez, before talking to Williams and Johnson about Moreno.
“She always would joke, ‘The producer said he wanted Emmy Award-winning shots. What do you expect?’ And that’s what she did. She was an award-winning helicopter photographer. And that job is so hard.
“I don’t think the viewer at home realizes how difficult it is what they do up there with a tiny screen in the back of a very loud chopper, trying to talk to us, trying to make sense, all while manning the camera. I mean, she was extraordinarily gifted. And like you both said, you toss up to her, and I did many times, and she always knew what to say.”
“That helicopter community is a small group of people, and it’s just devastating to know that this has happened to one of those people, to our friends and our colleagues at NBC4,” CBS Los Angeles assignment editor Mike Rogers said, according to the BBC.
Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, said in a statement on X that she was “absolutely devastated by the loss of life in Chatsworth tonight.
“My heart is with the families and loved ones of those we lost in the tragic bus collision and helicopter crash.”
