February 10, 2021 • No Comments • Sports News

fstop123/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR, ABC News

(KANSAS CITY, Mo.) — The Kansas City Chiefs have placed outside linebackers coach Britt Reid on administrative leave amid an investigation into a car crash that left two young children injured.

“Outside Linebackers Coach Britt Reid has been placed on administrative leave following last Thursday’s multi-vehicle accident,” the professional football team said in a statement Tuesday. “We remain in the process of gathering information on the incident, and we will continue to assist local authorities as requested.”

Reid, 35, was involved in a three-vehicle collision on a highway near the Kansas City Chiefs’ training complex next to Arrowhead Stadium on Feb. 4. Reid was driving a Ram pickup truck when he struck two vehicles that were stopped on the side of southbound Interstate 435 just after 9 p.m. local time, according to a search warrant filed in Jackson County Circuit Court on Saturday by a detective with the Kansas City Missouri Police Department.

A 4-year-old child who was in the back seat of one of the vehicles that was hit was transported to an area hospital with non-life threatening injuries. A 5-year-old child who was also in the backseat was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. All other vehicle occupants suffered minor injuries, according to a press release from the Kansas City Missouri Police Department.

“The 5-year-old child injured in this incident remains in critical condition with a brain injury,” police said in a statement Monday.

The Kansas City Chiefs has identified the critically injured child as Ariel Young.

“Our focus remains on Ariel Young and her family,” the team said in the statement Tuesday. “We have reached out to the family to offer our support and resources to them during this difficult time, and we will continue to pray for her recovery.”

Police have said they are investigating whether Reid was impaired before the crash and that the probe could take several weeks.

ABC News has reached out to Reid for comment. It was unclear whether he has obtained legal representation.

The search warrant filed in Jackson County Circuit Court, which was obtained by Kansas City ABC affiliate KMBC, requested access to Reid’s cellphone to “determine if there was any phone activity prior to or at the time of the crash, that may have distracted his attention, and whether the phone was used after the crash to communicate about the incident with other persons.” Police seized Reid’s phone on Saturday, shortly after the warrant was granted, according to KMBC.

Reid did not travel with the Kansas City Chiefs to the Super Bowl LV in Tampa last weekend because he was still hospitalized, a source told ESPN’s Dianna Russini. He could be hospitalized for days due to his injuries, the source said.

Reid’s father, Andy Reid, who is head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, addressed the crash during a press conference Sunday night after his team lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the Super Bowl.

“My heart goes out to all those that were involved in the accident, in particular the family with the little girl who is fighting for her life,” Andy Reid said. “And listen, it’s a tough situation. I can’t comment on it any more than what I am here, so the questions that you have I’m going to have to turn those down at this time. But just from a human standpoint, my heart bleeds for everybody involved in that.”

ABC News’ Nicholas Cirone, Katie Conway, Matt Foster, Henderson Hewes and Joshua Hoyos contributed to this report.

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February 10, 2021 • No Comments • Sports News

Christain Petersen/Getty ImagesBy ALLIE YANG, ABC News

(DALLAS) — A day after Mark Cuban said the national anthem will no longer be played at the Dallas Mavericks’ home games, the NBA said “all teams will play the national anthem in keeping with longstanding league policy.”

The Mavericks have not played the anthem before any of its preseason and regular-season games this season, ESPN reported. On Wednesday, the team announced that it would play the anthem before its match up against the Atlanta Hawks.

“We respect and always have respected the passion people have for the anthem and our country,” Cuban wrote in a corresponding statement. “But we also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them. We feel that their voices need to be respected and heard, because they have not been.”

Cuban told ESPN in June 2020 that he was “proud” of those taking a knee and said, “Hopefully, I’d join them.”

Cuban has not hidden his thoughts about protests of the national anthem on Twitter.

“The National Anthem Police in this country are out of control,” he tweeted. “If you want to complain, complain to your boss and ask why they don’t play the National Anthem every day before you start work.”

“I can say Black Lives Matter,” he said in another tweet. “I can say there is systemic racism in this country.”

Cuban told ESPN he initially made the decision to stop playing the national anthem after consulting with NBA commissioner Adam Silver.

NBA rules require players to stand during the national anthem, but Silver has not enforced it, especially as kneeling during the anthem became a popular form of silent protest over the past several years, according to ESPN.

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February 10, 2021 • No Comments • Sports News

David McNew/Getty ImagesBy AMANDA MAILE, MINA KAJI and ALEX STONE, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Federal investigators on Tuesday said the helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others, including the pilot, crashed last January when the pilot became disoriented after flying in thick fog.

The pilot did not follow training, violated visual flight rules and was unable to differentiate between up and down, investigators found.

The pilot, Ara Zobayan, was flying under Visual Flight Rules, meaning he needed full visibility. Instead of diverting the Jan. 26, 2020, flight to a nearby airport, Zobayan continued the flight into dense clouds, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said. The investigators said he tried to climb out of the cloud cover but instead turned left and descended, slamming the helicopter into nearby hills.

Bryant and their close family friends were headed to a basketball game at Bryant’s Mamba Sports Academy on the day of the crash.

Zobayan had been employed by Island Express Helicopters since 2011, logging about 8,500 hours of pilot-flying time. He had been flying in the area of the crash for a decade and often flew Kobe Bryant.

Zobayan reportedly told air traffic control they were “climbing” to 4,000 feet, when in reality the aircraft was falling, according to the NTSB.

“The scenario we believe happened is that he is flying along, he realizes he’s getting boxed in with visibility, and he must have made the decision that I’m going to punch up through these clouds and get on top,” NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said.

Board members said the crash could have been prevented and the pilot “went contrary to his training.”

The Los Angeles Police Department had grounded its own fleet of helicopters the morning of the crash due to poor visibility. One eyewitness described the fog as “like jumping into a pool of milk.”

Zobayan sent a text message the morning of the crash, saying, “Weather looking ok” after expressing concerns the day before that the flight may not take off due to poor conditions. Zobayan frequently piloted flights for Bryant and “likely did not want to disappoint him” the NTSB said. Despite this, the agency said Zobayan was not pressured to conduct the flight by neither Island Express nor his client.

The helicopter involved in the crash was a Sikorsky S-76B owned and operated by Island Express. It was not equipped with a flight-data recorder nor a cockpit voice recorder, both of which were not required.

The agency disclosed that the engines were working at the time of impact and there appeared to be no mechanical issues with the chopper.

There were 184 aircraft crashes from 2010 to 2019 from spatial disorientation — 20 of them were fatal helicopter crashes, the NTSB said.

The crash has led to a slew of lawsuits including one from Vanessa Bryant in February 2020 against the pilot and the company that owned the helicopter for negligence and wrongful deaths. Families of the other victims have sued the helicopter company.

Island Express did not immediately respond to request for comment.

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February 10, 2021 • No Comments • Sports News

iStockBy ABC News

(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Tuesday’s sports events:

NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Detroit 122, Brooklyn 111
New Orleans 130, Houston 101
Miami 98, New York 96
Golden State 114, San Antonio 91
Portland 106, Orlando 97
Philadelphia 119, Sacramento 111
Utah 122, Boston 108

NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Florida 2, Detroit 1
Edmonton 3, Ottawa 2
Chicago 2, Dallas 1 (OT)
Tampa Bay 6, Nashville 1
Calgary 3, Winnipeg 2
Vegas 5, Anaheim 4
San Jose 4, Los Angeles 3 (SO)
Philadelphia at Washington (Postponed)
St. Louis at Minnesota (Postponed)
Arizona at Colorado (Postponed)

TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL
West Virginia 82, Texas Tech 71
Alabama 81, South Carolina 78
Texas 80, Kansas St. 77
Creighton 63, Georgetown 48
DePaul at Villanova (Postponed)
Florida St. at Virginia Tech (Postponed)

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February 9, 2021 • No Comments • Sports News

33ft/iStockBy BILL HUTCHINSON, ABC News

(TAMPA, Fla.) — Thousands of football fans in Tampa, Florida, many seen without masks and partying shoulder-to-shoulder in the streets as if in a pre-coronavirus time warp, are worrying health care professionals who fear the Super Bowl LV hoopla will become a COVID-19 super-spreader event.

Following the hometown Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ blowout win over the Kansas City Chiefs, revelers poured into the streets outside Raymond James Stadium and elsewhere in the city, apparently throwing caution to the wind and ignoring guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stay masked up and socially distanced.

The NFL limited the crowd capacity to 22,000 in the 65,000-seat stadium and required spectators to wear masks. But outside, video footage from some Tampa neighborhoods showed scores of people without masks, turning streets into dance floors and high-fiving and hugging friends and strangers with abandon. Several nightclubs even opened their doors to take advantage of the festive atmosphere.

ABC News contributor Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, called the spontaneous congregated scenes in Tampa an apparent “recipe for virus transmission.”

Adding to fears is the fact that the Super Bowl was played amidst the backdrop of the highly-contagious B117 variant, also known as the U.K. or British variant, sweeping through South Florida.

“Time will tell, but we have seen throughout the pandemic that when people gather — especially when you have drinking … as well as shouting and screaming, which can help project the virus — this creates a good substrate for the virus,” Brownstein said.

He noted that 10 days after the famed Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota drew more than 460,000 people over the summer, a dramatic increase in new COVID-19 infections and deaths were traced to the event.

“That was a good example of a single-point event that brought a lot of people together with minimal adherence to interventions, and we saw the repercussions of cases and deaths as the result of a single event,” Brownstein said.

Tampa Mayor Jane Castor defended her city’s handling of the event on Monday, saying, “The media can always find examples of bad behavior.”

“I’m proud to say that the majority of individuals that I saw out and about enjoying the festivities associated with the Super Bowl were complying,” Castor said during a news conference. “They understood their level of personal responsibility and they were doing the right thing.”

She said that prior to the Super Bowl, the city enacted a mask mandate for certain neighborhoods where people are known to congregate, handed out 200,000 masks and launched a safety campaign in which thousands of volunteers were out advising people to wear masks or pull them up to cover their noses and mouths.

“You can supply everyone with a mask, advise them of the science behind it and expect that they are going to abide by the mask order,” Castor said. “Again, you’re going to find a few that don’t, but the majority that I saw were wearing masks.”

Castor did not release numbers on how many people police cited for violating COVID-19 protocols.

Cellphone videos posted on social media showed thousands of people, many not wearing masks, lining the streets of 7th Avenue in the popular Ybor City neighborhood throughout the weekend and late into Sunday night. Many of the revelers crowded inside and outside clubs that were open for business.

“Scenes from Ybor last night and a few other clubs were incredibly disappointing,” the Tampa Police Department said in a statement to ABC affiliate WFTS-TV in Tampa. “The city spent the better part of a year educating residents on precautions due to the pandemic and have recently put a mask order in place for both the entertainment and event zones to ensure the safety of our residents and visitors to our great city.”

Dr. Jay Wolfson, senior associate dean of the Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida, told ABC News on Monday that the videos of football fans celebrating out in public are “just the tip of the iceberg” of the festivities that went on over the weekend in the Tampa area.

“There were neighborhood parties and basement parties, and parties inside private venues that we didn’t see where the same thing was going on in even more confined quarters,” Wolfson said.

He added that he drove by a barbecue restaurant Sunday night in a suburb of Tampa that was crowded inside and outside with Kansas City Chiefs fans, many of whom were not wearing masks or socially distancing.

Wolfson noted that many of the football fans who descended on Tampa over the weekend were from out of state.

“They’re going to now take whatever they have gotten from here, and some of them will have gotten something, and they’re going to bring it back to Kansas City or Chicago, or Minneapolis, wherever they come from, and that’s going to be part of that super-spreader activity,” Wolfson said. “And then we’re going to experience the same thing because many of the folks in the streets were Tampa or Florida residents.”

Mayor Castor said the celebration isn’t over. Tampa is planning to commemorate the Buccaneers’ big win with a public celebration. She said the city proved it can safely hold such an event after organizing a boat parade on the bay and a free ceremony at Raymond James Stadium that drew an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people in September after the Tampa Bay Lightning won the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup.

“We can’t have a historical event of this significance in our community and not celebrate,” said Castor, adding that the city saw no COVID-19 spikes after the Lightning’s celebration. “We will do it in a safe manner, but that adds another element to the celebration as well. But we definitely have to celebrate this momentous occasion.”

Meanwhile, St. Petersburg, Florida, Mayor Rick Kriseman is threatening to hit rapper 50 Cent with a fine for hosting a Super Bowl party on Friday night inside a private hanger at Albert Whitted Airport. Video of the event posted on Snapchat and Facebook showed a large crowd with many people, who paid a cover charge, not wearing masks.

“This isn’t how we should be celebrating the Super Bowl. It’s not safe or smart. It’s stupid,” Kriseman wrote on Twitter. “We’re going to take a very close look at this, and it may end up costing someone a lot more than 50 cent.”

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