The air ambulance was a twin-engine fixed wing turboprop with four aboard.  Thirteen minutes into the flight, the pilot reported to air traffic control that he smelled smoke in the cockpit.  A fire had started beneath a circuit breaker panel mounted on the cockpit floor between the pilot and co-pilot seats.  The crew began...

Joey Crane, 20, and his brother Bobby, 17, were driving from Danville, California, to Los Angeles in the family’s SUV for a vacation at the beach. Suddenly the tread peeled off the right rear tire. Joey lost control of the vehicle. It rolled over and Bobby was killed. The official report concluded that the...

Gas leaked from a service line buried beneath a busy street. The gas found its way into nearby homes, where it ignited. The explosion killed two and burned three. PG&E blamed a contractor who struck the service line with a backhoe during a sewer repair project some months earlier. We proved that the contractor...

Jeffrey’s father gave 2-year-old Jeffrey a popular Mini-Jel candy as a special treat. Jeffrey began to choke. His father tried to remove the candy from Jeffrey’s throat but could not dislodge it. Jeffrey suffered serious brain damage and died two weeks later. We had the candy tested in a laboratory and learned that it...

An air ambulance helicopter crashed when one of the main rotor blades came apart in flight. The three-person crew was killed. The rotor blades were made of composite materials that were almost entirely consumed in the post-crash fire. Government investigators worked for more than a year but, with little evidence available, never determined why...