CBS VIDEO: Conflicting San Francisco Fire Personnel Statements About Fire Ops When Asiana Crash Victim Ye Meng Yuan Was Accidentally Run Over

CBS News broadcast video received of the crash scene showing firefighting operations of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 that crashed on July 6, 2013.

Video from a camera mounted on a San Francisco firefighter’s helmet was provided to CBS News by a source close to the family of Ye Meng Yuan, who was apparently run over by a fire suppression vehicle at the scene. A second video was obtained from an airport fire crash truck “Rescue Truck 10.”


CBS: Firefighters warned of Asiana crash victim on tarmac before running her over.

One of Ye Meng Yuan’s family attorneys says that what the family wants is accountability. They want to know why weren’t the firefighters trained, why weren’t the supervisors certified and why hasn’t the fire department come clean about what happened?”

The CBS video presents contradictory statements between a firefighter on the scene at the time of the emergency and a statement made last month by San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White.

On the scene a firefighter warns other firefighters not to enter the aircraft, “They say everybody’s off. Let’s don’t go in there. Anybody’s in there right now, they’re dead.”

Then in December in an interview with CBS affiliate KPIX, San Francisco Fire Department Chief Joanne Hayes-White said, “Our members that day had difficult decisions to make. One was visualizing someone that appeared to be dead versus going onto the burning plane with reports of people that still needed to be rescued.”

Immediately after the incident, fire officials said the victim was hidden by foam, but video shows otherwise. In fact video shows that firefighters were warned about the victim’s position. Later, Ye Meng Yuan was run over twice.

One San Francisco lieutenant told crash investigators she “made a “three-second” visual assessment and thought, “That’s our first casualty” — but did not check the girl’s vital signs.

About 15 minutes after the driver was first alerted about the victim on the ground, the firefighter driving the Crash Truck ran Ye over.

The helmet camera shows another truck also drove over Ye’s body minutes later. The segment is edited out of the CBS video broadcast.

On Wednesday, December 11, 2013 the National Transportation Safety Board released a 27-second video showing Asiana Flight 214 descending with its tail too low. The aircraft can then be seen hitting the seawall and slamming into the ground before somersaulting off to the side of the runway.

PRELIMINARY REPORT of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB/December 2013)
On July 6, 2013, about 1128 PDT, Asiana Airlines flight 214, a Boeing 777-200ER, registration HL7742, impacted the sea wall and subsequently the runway during landing on runway 28L at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), San Francisco, California. Of the four flight crew members, 12 flight attendants, and 291 passengers; about 182 were transported to the hospital with injuries and three passengers were fatally injured.
The airplane was destroyed by impact forces and post-crash fire. The regularly scheduled passenger flight was operating under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 129 between Incheon International Airport, Seoul, South Korea, and SFO. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident.

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