A pilot and two ground crew members are being charged with negligent homicide following the death of a 22-year-old British tourist by a helicopter’s rotor blades in Greece on Monday. Still, competing accounts by witnesses put a spotlight on the tragic incident.
Kent resident Jack Fenton died when he reportedly walked into a rented Bell 407’s spinning rotor blades at a private heliport in Spata, Greece, according to the British daily outlet The Times.
Four passengers, including Fenton, had been escorted from the helicopter and to a special lounge to await their trip back to London, according to an account from Ioannis Kandyllis, president of Greece’s commission for aviation accidents.
Kandyllis claimed the victim left the lounge and ran back to the tarmac, “rushing to the helicopter at a fast pace.”
“Witnesses we spoke to said he had a phone to his ear and was walking fast to the aircraft, defying ground crew shouting for him ‘Stop, stop!’ Within seconds the tragic accident occurred. It was horrific,” Kandyllis stated.
Fenton, a junior account executive at a social media marketing company, was traveling with friends who later vehemently denied several critical details of Kandyllis’ account, namely that Fenton was on his phone and that the group had been taken to a lounge before the incident.
“No instructions were given when exiting the helicopter, and no one escorted us to the lounge. All they did was open the doors for us,” stated Fenton’s friend, Jack Stanton-Gleaves, 20, per Fox News. “We disembarked on our own, and no one stopped Jack from going to the rear of the helicopter. None of us reached the lounge before the accident happened.”
Stanton-Gleaves added, “I’ve heard people say Jack was on his phone and ran back to the helicopter, and this is totally untrue. He was not on his phone, and why he turned toward the rear of the helicopter, I don’t know.”
Greece’s official news agency, ANA, stated that the pilot and two ground crew members had been taken into custody and interrogated.
Authorities subsequently brought them to Athens, where they will appear in court on allegations of negligent homicide, a spokeswoman for the Greek police told The Telegraph.