Accidental Deaths

Los Angeles County coroner's officials worked Thursday to confirm the identities of two men killed in a plane crash at Santa Monica Airport, but friends of the two men identified them as the general manager of an aviation website and a world-traveling Internet business development consultant. Paulo Emanuele, believed to be 46, was the general manager of the airliners.net website. Martin Schaedel, believed to be about 23, was a consultant to FareCompare, an airline fare comparison website.

The giant fire in Angeles National Forest continued its slow-motion rampage through the mountains Sunday, causing the deaths of two firefighters as it bore down on the semirural community of Acton and threatened to overrun Mt. Wilson. The two firefighters were killed when they drove off the side of a treacherous road in the Mt. Gleason area, south of Acton, around 2:30 p.m., said Los Angeles County Deputy Fire Chief Mike Bryant. He did not release their names or other details. "This accident is tragic," Bryant said, choking up as he spoke Sunday evening.

Medical experts say cosmetic surgery should be performed only on relatively healthy people. But Donda West, the 58-year-old mother of rapper Kanye West, had a number of serious health issues, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar and cardiac artery blockage, according to an autopsy report released this week. Still, a Brentwood plastic surgeon approved her for extensive cosmetic surgery last year. She died Nov.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Roger Avary was trying to revive his wife in the middle of the road when a witness came upon his smashed-up car on a rural state highway near Ojai. "He was yelling, 'Don't die, Gretchen! Don't die!,' " said former Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury, one of the first witnesses on the scene after the single-car crash early Sunday that left one man dead and Avary's wife, Gretchen, seriously injured.

California officials lack the authority to determine whether Metrolink was partly responsible for the deaths of 11 people in a commuter train crash in 2005, lawyers for the transit service argued Tuesday. Facing skeptical state judges in Los Angeles, Metrolink lawyers argued that federal railroad regulations ban most attempts by California to improve commuter rail safety. Only the federal government can do that, lawyers for Metrolink argued.

Scaled Composites, the fledgling space tourism company founded by rocket pioneer Burt Rutan, was fined $25,870 on Friday as a result of an accident last July that killed three workers at the firm's Mojave, Calif., testing facility. The fine covered five violations of workplace safety codes, including a failure to maintain a safe working environment and to properly train workers handling hazardous materials, according to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

Five people were killed Sunday afternoon when two small planes collided over Corona and debris rained down on a busy commercial strip of auto dealerships, authorities said. Four of the victims of the 3:35 p.m. accident were aboard the two aircraft that crashed about a mile from Corona Municipal Airport, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. The other was killed on the ground by debris that fell from the aircraft, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The investigation into actor Heath Ledger's death Monday as a possible drug overdose is bringing attention to a nationwide health crisis: Overdose fatalities have risen dramatically in the United States since 1999, largely because of prescription drugs. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unintentional poisoning deaths -- 95% of which are drug overdoses -- increased from 12,186 in 1999 to 20,950 in 2004.

If Kaiser Permanente's Fresno hospital had acted on complaints and kept a closer watch over its medical staff, two babies might still be alive, federal health inspectors concluded in a report released this week. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began investigating the hospital in October, two days after the Los Angeles Times reported that doctors and nurses had complained repeatedly to higher-ups about perinatologist Hamid Safari's medical and interpersonal skills.

Two small planes that collided in midair over Corona last month and killed five people never swerved to avoid contact, indicating that the pilots may not have spotted one another even though it was a clear day, according to a preliminary report released Thursday. Witnesses told investigators that the Cessna 172 and Cessna 150 flew toward each other for at least five seconds before the collision, the National Transportation Safety Board report stated.