Teenager Ye Meng Yuan was killed by an emergency vehicle that was rushing to the scene of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed-landed at San Francisco Airport last July, according to coroner. A newly released video obtained by CBS suggests that the firefighters had spotted the girl on the ground, but did not move her nor stop other emergency workers, which led to her getting run over twice.
The girl's parents have filed a claim against the city of San Francisco, and a court may eventually have to decide whether fire crews in the video were negligent and should be held accountable for the girl's death. The video challenges earlier claims that she was accidentally run over because she may have been covered in firefighting foam.
The video was captured on a camera attached to a firefighter's helmet.
"Who, whoa, whoa! Stop, stop, stop! There's a body... there's a body right there. Right in front of you," the firefighter called out to the driver of an emergency vehicle racing toward the scene. The driver then slowed down and opened his door in an apparent effort to understand the warning.
Another video from a fire truck shows a firefighter on the ground directing the truck around a victim, who was not covered in foam at the time.
Ye was eventually run over by a fire truck, San Francisco Fire Department Chief Joanna Hayes-White said last July.
"I particularly want to express our condolences and apologies to the family of Ye Meng Yuan," the chief said. "We're heartbroken. We're in the business of saving lives...There's not a lot of words to describe how badly we feel about it."
The 16-year-old girl was alive when flung from the plane, but died of "multiple blunt injuries that are consistent with being run over by a motor vehicle," said San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault. "Internal bleeding ruled out any chance she was dead when she was struck, she was alive at the time when she received the injuries."
In the claim against the city, the attorneys for Ye's family wrote that said emergency responders "were grossly negligent." Their attorney wrote that the emergency workers who discovered Ye on the ground "failed to move her to a safe location, failed to mark her location; failed to protect her from moving vehicles in the vicinity of the aircraft where it was known that vehicles would be traveling; failed to alert commanders at the scene; and/or abandoned Ye Meng Yuan in a perilous location."
Two other people died, and ten others were in critical condition and 182 injured. Of the passenger, 141 (almost half) were Chinese citizens, where 70 students and teachers were traveling to United States for summer camp, and 35 of the students were to West Valley Christian School.
