For anyone who watched Southern California news over the last several years, Eliana Moreno’s voice was often the first to explain what was unfolding beneath a helicopter’s rotors, a wildfire cresting a ridge, a freeway pileup, a police pursuit winding through city streets. She did that work, in both English and Spanish, for NBC4 and Telemundo 52, and she was doing it Tuesday evening over Chatsworth when the aircraft she was riding in went down, killing her, pilot George Marciniw, and a person on the ground.
Moreno was born and raised in Orange County and stayed rooted there throughout her career. She died in the helicopter crash at age 39, according to reports, while covering a fatal Metro bus collision, the very kind of breaking news story she’d built her career narrating from the sky. She graduated from Chapman University in 2010 with dual degrees in broadcast journalism and political science.
Before she ever went airborne, she reported and anchored in both English and Spanish for several Orange County media outlets, and she also worked for KCAL 9 and KCBS 2. She joined Angel City Air, the company that operated NewsChopper4, in September 2010, eventually becoming one of the station’s most familiar aerial photojournalists, fluent in Spanish, skilled in editing software like AVID and Final Cut, and credited on her LinkedIn profile as having worked as a camerawoman, anchor, producer, and spokeswoman over the course of her career. She began flying alongside Marciniw in 2023.
Colleagues and friends described her devotion to the job in personal terms. Her Instagram handle, “Eli in the Heli,” captured how closely she’d tied her identity to the work; in one recent post, she wrote about how aerial reporting “turns smoke on the horizon into critical information that saves lives and property.” Her LinkedIn bio noted that since age 11, she’d known she wanted to be a television news reporter, and that in her spare time, she guest spoke to aspiring journalists at local high schools and colleges, passing on what she’d built her whole career toward.
She was also, by her own account, someone who pushed past her own limits outside of work. Moreno had lived with severe asthma since childhood, bad enough that she was once medically excused from running in school. Earlier this year, she wrote about setting a goal to run just one mile by the end of 2026, and instead ran the OC Marathon’s half marathon in under two hours with her fiancé, writing that she’d “surpassed everything I thought I could ever do.”
As for her family: reporting on this point is still unsettled. Some outlets have described her as recently engaged, referencing a fiancé she tagged in social posts; at least one report has called her a newlywed and mother, though that detail hasn’t been corroborated by the more established outlets covering her death. What multiple outlets do agree on is that her family has asked for privacy while they grieve, and no names or public statement from relatives have been released as of this writing. NBC4 and Telemundo 52, in their joint statement, said they were “deeply saddened” and extended “heartfelt condolences to the families, friends and colleagues of those who lost their lives,” without singling out further personal detail, consistent with the family’s wishes.
In the hours after her death, tributes came from colleagues and viewers alike, many remembering her as someone who’d found, and clearly loved, what one tribute piece called simply “the best job in the world.”
