The brother of Merce Camprubi Montal, the young wife and mother who died in this week’s New York City helicopter crash along with four other family members and the pilot, threw flowers into the mist-covered Hudson River on Saturday to honor the victims.
Shortly after the flowers were thrown near the site of the crash, Joan Camprubi and Mayor Eric Adams spoke to the press.
“They left together. They left without suffering,” Camprubi said.
“We mourn the lives of Agustín, Merce and their three beautiful children, Victor, Mercedes and Augustine. Our hearts are broken,” Adams added.
“You have 8.5 million New Yorkers who want to say to the family members and to the wider Spanish community that we are here with you, and this symbolic gesture is our way of knowing and acknowledging that our words cannot bring back their family members, but it is our way of saying as New Yorkers, we stand united with this family during this moment of grief, and their grief is our grief,” Adams said.
Now family members of the victims are asking for privacy as they continue to mourn their loved ones.
“We want to move the bodies as soon as possible, home, back home, with all the family, to rest in peace together in our place,” Camprubi said.
“But also we want to thank all the institutional support that we received, starting from Spain, from also Catalonia, from U.S., New York, New Jersey. Everybody has been supporting us, and especially also Siemens as a company, where Merce and Agustín were working,” he continued.The doomed aircraft, a Bell 206, broke apart over the Hudson River Thursday afternoon and plunged into the water below with a loud boom, killing the Spanish family of five and the pilot on board during a tour over Manhattan that was meant to celebrate one of the family members’ birthdays.
Agustín Escobar and Merce Camprubi Montal, a married couple from Spain, were identified as two of the adult victims. The Spanish Foreign Ministry confirmed that the couple and their three children died in the helicopter crash.
A senior New York City official told NBC New York the third adult victim was the pilot, Sean Johnson. Johnson was 36 years old, according to the Jersey City mayor’s office.
Divers continued to recover pieces of the chopper from the Hudson on Saturday as investigators evaluate the aircraft’s flight control system, the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation into the crash, said Saturday.
The divers are still searching for the helicopter’s main rotor, main gear box, tail rotor and a large portion of the tail boom, the NTSB said. The main fuselage, including the cockpit and cabin, the forward portion of the tail boom, the horizontal stabilizer finlets and the vertical fin have been recovered.
The helicopter was not equipped with any flight recorders, the NTSB said. It had last been inspected on March 1 and completed seven tour flights earlier Thursday.
The accident took place during the aircraft’s eighth flight of the day, according to the NTSB. The cause of the crash remains unclear.
NBC aviation analyst Jeff Guzzetti said on NBC’s “TODAY” show Friday that weather doesn’t appear to be a factor, although there were some gusts and wind in the area. He noted they are looking into potential hardware issues that could have befallen the flight.
