Originally Posted by Frosstbyte

MOAB, they're just going to say "You didn't commit a crime, so it's different." He's a convenient scapegoat for a tragedy. Instead of, god forbid, we hold an "innocent' responsible for being an idiot and not knowing how to fly his helicopter, we blame the guy on the ground. Yes, in some global sense he did "cause" them to be there, but he had NOTHING to do with how they flew or their skill in flying helicopters. It's chaos theory applied to liability.

Edit: They weren't "just trying to help." They were part of a media frenzy fueled by a voyeuristic society that loves disaster porn. I think the police asking media helicopters to "help with the chase" is bad for really this exact reason. They're not people trained to follow criminals. They're people trained to follow a story. I cannot imagine how absolutely brain dead those two pilots must have been to allow themselves to get that close to one another and then to collide. They blew it, and blew it hard. Life does not owe you a perfectly safe experience. One or both of those pilots made serious errors today and if ANYONE should be held responsible, it is them. The families of the reporters should, by all means, sue the negligent pilot who caused the crash, because the blame lies very clearly on him.