LOS ANGELES — 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. 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.
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 graphic report made it clear: Bryant and the passengers almost certainly were dead in an instant due to blunt trauma These injuries are rapidly if not instantly fatal,” wrote Juan Carrillo, senior deputy medical examiner, in Bryant’s report.
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.