When it struck the ground, the helicopter was flying at about 184 mph and descending at a rate of more than 4,000 feet per minute. Zobayan, an experienced pilot who often flew Bryant, climbed sharply and had nearly succeeded in breaking through the clouds when the craft took an abrupt left turn and plunged into the grassy, oak-studded hills below. The group, including one of his daughter’s coaches and two of her teammates, encountered thick fog in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. The crash that killed the 41-year-old retired Los Angeles Lakers star, his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna - donning the jersey she would have worn to play that morning, with the word “Mamba” on the front and her last name on the back - pilot Ara Zobayan and the others is considered accidental.īryant was headed from Orange County to his daughter’s tournament at his Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks on the morning of Jan. “These injuries are rapidly if not instantly fatal,” wrote Juan Carrillo, senior deputy medical examiner, in Bryant’s report. The graphic report made it clear: Bryant and the passengers almost certainly were dead in an instant due to blunt trauma. One of the most popular sports figures in Los Angeles and a celebrity around the globe, Bryant had to be identified by his fingerprints after his body was found in the dirt outside the wreckage of the chopper.

The reports by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office provide a clinical but unvarnished look at just how brutal the crash was, describing broken bones, dismembered body parts and a stench of fuel on what remained of clothing that burned. LOS ANGELES (AP) - The pilot flying Kobe Bryant and seven others to a youth basketball tournament did not have alcohol or drugs in his system, and all nine sustained immediately fatal injuries when their helicopter slammed into a hillside outside Los Angeles in January, according to autopsies released Friday.

Gigi bryant autopsy sketch