SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Three people were critically injured Monday evening after a medevac helicopter crashed onto freeway lanes of Highway 50 in East Sacramento.

The Airbus H130 helicopter, operated by Reach Air Medical Services, went down at 7:05 p.m. west of 59th Street, prompting a large emergency response as firefighters and motorists rushed to help the two women and a man from the hulking debris after it smashed into eastbound lanes.

Photos from the scene showed a red helicopter on its side in the middle of the freeway as first responders tended to the injured. About two hours after the crash, a twisted, mangled helicopter lay upside down across the freeway. The aircraft was split down the middle, exposing its damaged interior, as CHP investigators used flashlights along the shoulder to search for debris.

The cause of the crash is under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, which said Tuesday that the helicopter was heading back to Redding from UC Davis Medical Center when it went down.

Victims were Reach Air crew members

Three people — a pilot, a nurse and a paramedic — were aboard the helicopter and suffered critical injuries when it went down, according to firefighters. All three were taken to hospitals and are listed in critical condition, said Sacramento Fire Department Capt. Justin Sylvia. He said all three were transported to UCDMC within 20 minutes of the crash.

Just after 7 p.m., the California Highway Patrol received a mayday call from an aircraft that was going down, said Officer Michael Harper, a spokesperson for the CHP’s South Sacramento office.

The officer, who has been working for about 20 years for with the CHP, said he had never seen a helicopter crash before. He said he might stay up all night as investigators collected evidence and took measurements of the crash site ahead of federal investigators’ expected arrival overnight.

Sylvia said firefighters initially dispatched an engine, a truck, a battalion chief and an ambulance for a reported vehicle extraction.

“Further updates came in from multiple callers reporting a helicopter had crashed in the middle of Highway 50,” Sylvia said. “At that point, we were getting initial reports that there were vehicles involved. However, after walking the scene, there are no additional vehicles involved.”

The first arriving engine found one of the victims had been trapped under the helicopter, Sylvia said.

“The captain immediately sequestered the help of civilians that were standing around,” Sylvia said. “They were able to lift part of that helicopter out and get that victim out so we could get them loaded into the back of an ambulance and transported off the scene.”

According to aircraft tracking service FlightRadar24, the Airbus H130 helicopter operated as Reach 5 had taken off from the roof of UCDMC just minutes before the crash.

Representatives for Reach, which is based at McClellan Airport, confirmed the crash involving its helicopter.

“We are aware of an accident involving a Reach Air Medical helicopter on Highway 50 in Sacramento this evening and are keeping all those impacted in our thoughts and prayers,” a spokesperson for Texas-based Global Medical Response said in an email.

The spokesperson confirmed no patients were aboard and said more updates would be provided as they become available.

According to FAA records, the helicopter has been in service with Reach since 2021.

A video posted to TikTok by user @vladmallco showed the helicopter hovering above the freeway before it plunged to the ground, tilting onto its left side as its rotor blades snapped off. The brief clip appeared to show one of the landing skids shaking moments before the crash.

Motorists rush to rescue crash victims

Isabella Lozano had been traveling in the eastbound lanes of the freeway when the crash happened in front of her family’s vehicle.

“We were driving down Highway 50 ... to take my grandson home, all of a sudden we see this helicopter,” she said. “I thought it was gonna land but it kept going down lower — and it just nose-dived. ... And we all ran out of our cars, and I kept telling everyone, ‘Pull her out. Get her out. Get the people out.’ We didn’t know what was gonna happen.”

She said 10 to 15 motorists had stepped in with firefighters to help lift one of the victims, a woman, from the wreckage.

“They lifted it up and pulled her from underneath it,” she said, describing the efforts. She said she could see the pilot still stuck inside the aircraft as another woman made her way out of the aircraft.

“I know her name because I saw her name tag — and she wasn’t breathing,” Lozano said. “She cannot be a John Doe. She has somebody that loves her.

“I kept praying for her and told her, ‘Don’t die. Please don’t die. You got somebody that loves you, please don’t die.’”

Lozano described it as a “horrible, horrible scene,” like nothing she had seen before.

Her grandson, Chris Lozano, 25, was one of the motorists who helped firefighters.

“(I) had to run out the car, and I ran to the helicopter,” he said. “There was one (person) that was outside, and there was one underneath, and there’s one in the cockpit. And then a bunch of people came, and we helped lift the helicopter, and we pulled her under — we had to pull her from under.”

He called the crash “surreal” but said he rushed to help even before his grandfather had put the car in park.

“I just got out the car and just ran to the helicopter, tried to make sure everybody was all right,” he said. “I mean, I don’t want to get too deep into it, but I lost a best friend. I wasn’t there to save him, so that kind of put me in a state of mind — you know, you had to do something.”

Eastbound Highway 50 reopens

Emergency crews faced challenges reaching the crash site due to heavy traffic and the ongoing freeway construction zone. Sylvia said fire crews had to access the scene by driving in the wrong direction from 59th Street.

“Traffic is the biggest thing for us. Everyone’s just bound up. There’s nowhere for them to go, especially in a construction zone — it makes it rather difficult for our large apparatus to navigate around,” he said.

Caltrans, the CHP and the Sacramento Police Department had set up several road closures and diversions. By 10:15 p.m., one eastbound lane of Highway 50 had reopened and all eastbound lanes reopened by about 1:50 a.m. Tuesday.

By early Tuesday morning, traffic appeared to be flowing normally, according to the CHP’s Sacramento Communications Center. A representative said around 5:30 a.m. that there were no longer any closures associated with the crash.

A live traffic map on 511.org early Tuesday showed eastbound traffic moving steadily, with two lanes open and one lane still partially closed near the crash site.

_____

(The Sacramento Bee’s Rosalio Ahumada, Nathaniel Levine, Cathie Anderson and Daniel Hunt contributed to this story.)

_____

©2025 The Sacramento Bee. Visit sacbee.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.