The 16-year-old girl who was run over by a vehicle after the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was alive when she was hit, two sources close to the investigation into her death told The Chronicle on Thursday night.
San Mateo County coroner’s investigators determined that Ye Meng Yuan
died of blunt force trauma as a result of being hit by a vehicle, said
the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified because they
were not authorized to speak publicly about the case. It’s not known
what vehicle hit the girl, but most rigs on the scene were San Francisco
fire trucks stationed at the airport.
Coroner Robert Foucrault,
reached late Thursday, would not comment on the results of an autopsy
his office performed on Ye. He said he would announce his conclusions
during a news conference Friday.
San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White and a spokesman for Police Chief Greg Suhr both said Thursday that they had not been provided definitive findings and could not comment.
Foucrault said he met Thursday with the families of all three victims
who died as a result of the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 to
notify them of autopsy results.
That Ye was alive when she was hit by a San Francisco airport fire
rig deepens the mystery surrounding her death. If she had been ejected
from the plane during the crash, her injuries would not have been fatal,
based on autopsy findings that a vehicle caused her trauma.
No witnesses have come forward to say they saw Ye alive in the area where her body was eventually found, the coroner said. The National Transportation Safety Board has been interviewing passengers and first responders to the crash to try to determine what happened to Ye.
Body found near wing
Ye was sitting in the back of the plane, according to the safety
board, but her body was found near the left wing. It’s unknown if she
was thrown from the jet when it hit a seawall at the end of the runway,
breaking off its tail. Some other casualties who were sitting in the
back – including Ye’s friend Wang Lin Jia,
one of the two other girls who died – were found behind the aircraft.
The third girl killed, Liu Yi Peng, 15, was found in her seat on the
airplane and died six days after the crash.
Ye’s body, covered in fire-fighting foam, was found at the edge of a
paved path near the left wing sometime before 12:20 p.m., the time her
death was reported to dispatchers, the Fire Department said. That was 53 minutes after the crash.
“I don’t know how she got off the plane. I don’t think the NTSB knows, I talked to them today,” Foucrault said Thursday.
Two photographs taken by crash survivor Eugene Rah
show passengers outside the plane near the left wing, apparently after
all able-bodied survivors had fled the burning aircraft. Ye’s body is
not visible in those pictures, nor are passengers gathered where she
was found.
Fire Department video
According to sources, a Fire Department helmet-mounted video shows
the foam-covered location where the rig drove over Ye, who was buried in
as much as a foot of foam at that time. The video then shows a
firefighter pointing to the spot where the body crossed the path of
a vehicle.
However, because the body was covered with foam, it is unclear
whether that was the first time a rig had run over the victim. Foucrault
would not say whether the victim had been repeatedly crushed, only that
her injuries were extensive.
Ye was flying from China to visit Stanford University and then attend a three-week summer camp at a Christian school
in Southern California. Her family has been in the Bay Area since last
week, awaiting the coroner’s findings on what killed her. Foucrault said
the families are anxious to take the victims back to China for burial.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Vehicle-killed-girl-16-victim-of-Flight-214-4674126.php
