Kobe and Gigi Bryant: Searching for answers a year later (2024)

It’s been one year since a helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others crashed into a hillside in Calabasas, killing all nine on board. In some ways it feels like 10 years. In other ways it feels like yesterday.

At first, it didn’t make sense. What would Bryant be doing in a helicopter that far from home at 9:45 a.m. on a Sunday? The answer was crushing. A year earlier, Bryant opened a sports training center called the Mamba Academy in Thousand Oaks, just 20 miles from the crash site, and the group was headed to a girls basketball tournament.

Within minutes of TMZ’s report, news media and fans descended on Calabasas to get as close as they could to the fiery wreck. I was one of the reporters on the scene. Flames shot up a dusty hill that looked to be a mile or so above a water utility building. Police blocked off a hiking trail that led up the hill.

Dozens of Lakers fans in purple and gold jerseys and Kobe T-shirts gathered in the parking lot of AE Wright Middle School across from the water plant. Residents streamed out of their homes. Some were crying. Most just wandered from being so stunned. Then a woman screamed. A news report confirmed that Kobe and Gigi Bryant were among those killed in the crash. A group of first responders were visible from the aerial footage taken by the helicopters, but none of them seemed to move with any haste. There was nothing to be done. All aboard were killed instantly.

Word began to spread among the media that the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department would hold a press conference at the middle school. Then around 2 p.m., authorities announced the briefing had been moved to the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff Station just up the road. The sheriff’s station was small. A national sports reporter stood near the front door, faced her network’s camera and offered her thoughts on the death of a player she had covered for more than a decade. When the red light flickered off, she burst into tears.

The timing of Kobe’s death was like something out of a Greek myth. The Lakers had been abysmal since his retirement, but LeBron James was on his way to changing that. The night before the helicopter crash, LeBron passed Kobe for third place on the NBA’s all-time scoring list. Kobe congratulated him in a phone call that night. It was as if he had passed the mantle.

And then the next morning he was gone.

The entire city felt like a living memorial. Grief in western society is so often shoved into attics and dresser drawers. In the weeks and months after the Bryants’ deaths, it was difficult to travel three blocks without encountering a mural of Kobe or Gianna or both.

So many questions remained. A few weeks ago, I returned to Calabasas to find answers. I set out to find what had become of the site where the helicopter crashed. By making the 45-minute hike up the hillside, I hoped to gain some clarity about what happened on the morning of Jan. 26, 2020.

I left with more questions.

Police and National Transportation Safety Board investigators cordoned off the area in the days and weeks after the crash to deter scavengers and lookie-loos. Any time there is an aviation accident, the NTSB retrieves every fragment of debris in an attempt to piece together what went wrong. By the time I made my journey up the hill behind the water company off Las Virgenes Road, every piece of the downed white helicopter with robin-egg blue and navy piping from the top of the nose to the tip of the tail was long gone.

I found the latitude and longitude coordinates of the accident site on Wikipedia and plugged them into Google Maps. Aerial footage of the wreckage showed what looked like a hiking trail just steps away. I parked at a dog park across from the middle school and found a trailhead. If I took the Bark Park trail it would hit the New Millennium Loop Trail about a mile up. From there the hike would take another half hour. The route is favored by mountain bikers, and I passed one coming down the hill on my way to the site. There were no other hikers. The trail zigzagged into switchbacks to make the climb more manageable. As I got to a clearing, I could see the 101 freeway down in front of me.

Given the hundreds of Kobe memorials around L.A., I assumed there would be some kind of tribute to mark the spot where he died. Celebrity death is its own cottage industry. Until the pandemic forced its permanent closure this month, a bus picked up macabre tourists at the L.A. Farmers Market to take them on a tour of famous deaths in Los Angeles. Fans still lay flowers and plant pinwheels at the intersection of Routes 41 and 46 in Central California where James Dean died nearly 65 years ago. Surely, there would be as much or more for Bryant, who in death proved to be the most beloved living Angeleno.

I walked by the Bryant crash site twice before I noticed nine small rocks stacked on top of each other in two columns. That was it. Maybe those in charge of managing the trail are trying to keep it clear. Maybe the pandemic has kept foot traffic low. Or maybe the wounds are still too fresh.

If the crash was unfathomable before, it became even more so after sitting where the wreckage came to rest. The downslope of the hill faces the airport where the helicopter was due to land. The NTSB will release its report on the cause of the crash in the coming months. But whatever happened was so catastrophic it seemed to make the helicopter U-turn directly into its demise.

I sat and watched the sunset and wondered what the last moments were like for those on board, whether they were scared or if they had any idea what was coming. Watching the cars snake along the 101 below, I thought of the scientists who had raced to find a vaccine for COVID-19 in under a year, which is nothing short of a miracle. Would there ever come a day when scientists could bend the concept of time like a skilled magician with a spoon? Could these grieving families go back in time and stop their loved ones from getting on that helicopter? Could they part the unusual thick clouds that hung low over that Southern California morning so those teenage girls could make it safely to just another humdrum basketball game they would never even remember had they made it to adulthood?

The deaths of Kobe, Gigi, John Altobelli, Keri Altobelli, Alyssa Altobelli, Christina Mauser, Sarah Chester, Payton Chester and Ara Zobayan make no more sense today than they did a year ago. Perhaps the NTSB’s findings of what happened will prevent countless future deaths. But it still won’t bring them back.

As I descended the hill in near darkness, I thought about how the Lakers are waiting until fans can safely return to Staples Center again before they hoist their 17th championship banner. And who knows? They may even collect their 18th title by then. But it won’t just be a celebratory gathering. Lakers fans are still mourning the death of their brightest star. And when those fans do gather to cheer on the champions, many of them will wear Bryant jerseys.

It’s been so hard to mourn our losses in isolation. It’s as if our collective grieving process has been suspended just like the NBA season was last year. Getting together won’t fix everything. But it will help.

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