Kobe Bryant died at the age of 41 on Sunday, January 26, alongside his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven other passengers in a deadly helicopter crash in Calabasas, California.
The late basketball legend who also shared Natalia, 17, Bianka, 3, and Capri, 7 months, with his wife, Vanessa Bryant, was on his way to a basketball game with Gianna. The former Los Angeles Lakers player coached the teenager’s Athletic Amateur Union team.
“Gianna’s pretty easy to coach,” the Philadelphia native told Entertainment Tonight in 2018. “We haven’t had any issues of a dad-daughter sort of thing. She’s very competitive and she’s a hard worker, so there haven’t been any issues with that.”
The Wizenard Series: Training Camp creator’s second child was not only “hellbent” on playing for the University of Connecticut, but she “for sure” wanted to make it to the WNBA, Kobe told Jimmy Kimmel during an October 2018 appearance.
“The best thing that happens is we’ll go out, and fans will come up to me and she’ll be standing next to me,” the athlete told the host, 52, at the time. “And they’ll be like, ‘Hey, you gotta have a boy. You and Vanessa gotta have a boy to carry on the tradition, the legacy. And she is like, ‘Oy, I got this. You don’t need a boy for that, I got this.’ I’m like, ‘That’s right, you got this.’”
Kobe went on to say that he “absolutely” planned to break down game film with his daughter in the future. He explained, “We try to teach the kids what excellence looks like. We try to give them a foundation of the amount of work that it takes to be excellent. Playing basketball, we’re going to focus on the details. We’re going to learn the basics, learn the fundamentals and do those things over and over.”
Keep scrolling for more details about the father-daughter pair’s tragic accident, from the location of the crash to the helicopter’s safety history.
After taking off from John Wayne Airport, it passed over Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles and circled over Glendale before going down near Las Virgenes Road and Willow Glen Street in Calabasas.
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Authorities received a 911 call reporting the crash at 9:47 a.m.
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The chopper has a strong safety record, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
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“We extend our sincerest condolences to all those affected by today’s Sikorsky S-76B accident in Calabasas, California,” the company tweeted on Sunday. “We have been in contact with the NTSB and stand ready to provide assistance and support to the investigative authorities and our customer.”
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Los Angeles Police Department’s Air Support Division choppers were grounded due to foggy conditions and didn’t depart until later in the afternoon. (Their flight minimums are two miles of visibility and an 800-foot cloud ceiling.)
Spokesman Josh Rubenstein told The Los Angeles Times: “The weather situation did not meet our minimum standards for flying. [The fog] was enough that we were not flying.”
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Because the chemical “reacts with oxygen and water,” the inferno was “very hard to extinguish [and] … stubborn,” L.A. County Fire Chief Daryl Osby explained during a press conference.
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Kobe was scheduled to coach his daughter’s game at his Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks on Sunday.
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Baseball coach John Altobelli was among the other crash victims, Orange Coast College confirmed, along with his wife, Keri Altobelli, and their 13-year-old daughter, Alyssa. The teenager played on Gianna’s team.
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“Roughly 100 yards across in each direction,” the Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said of the crash site during a press conference on Sunday evening.
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On top of recovery, which will take a few days to complete as "quickly as possible, safely and thoroughly," the victims' bodies will then be identified and their families notified, Chief Medical Examiner Jonathan Lucas explained at the time.
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The crash site is closed off, so officials are directing mourners to a park about a quarter of a mile away.
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