Originally Posted by
wrench1
If you cause the death of another during the commission of a crime you can be charged in that death regardless their connection to the event. There are various past examples of this. The difference here is people died in an aircraft. In one case a carjacker fleeing police caused another vehicle to lose control and hit a tree where a pax in that car died as a result. No different than the R44 hitting a tree. The car jacker got 5 years for manslaughter.
But it is different. Unless the actions of the driver have some causal influence on the helicopter crashing, it is merely a contingent event.
Nor sure this is thread drift either, as virtually nothing is known about this accident and yet someone has already been charged with killing the pilots. Pretty relevant I‘d say.
Now if the police saw something, or had a hunch and followed it up, then something caused a loss of control, like getting shot at or blinded with a laser, then it would be a different matter. But that’s a lot of what ifs for an operation that didn’t even have flight monitoring and a dearth of information from the police to any such effect.
The driver should be charged for what they did. If they had no direct connection to the crash, no one is helped by pretending he was the problem.