The Brief

This isn’t a story of stylish renovations, or of celebrity filmmaker intervention. This is the story of one family who fell in love with a movie theater and did (and even lost) everything to keep it up and running.

The single-screen Gardena Cinema has been owned by the Kim family since 1976, and has always figured out ways to serve its community — even through some very difficult financial times.

After struggling through a pandemic and ill-fated efforts to bring people back through its doors, Gardena Cinema finally hit some success after it stopped dealing with first-run releases and pivoted to repertory films. Many nights at this South Bay theater, you can catch a newish — or oldish — classics like La La Land and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Kim family

The Gardena Cinema has always been a movie theater. It opened in 1946 as the Park Theatre, and operated consistently through the years showing first and second run feature films until it went up for sale in the 1970s.

That’s where the Kim family comes in. John and Nancy Kim immigrated from South Korea and had the goal of operating their own business. They dabbled in a few different industries when Nancy found the theater.

“My mom fell in love with it as soon as she came and saw it,” says current Gardena Cinema owner Judy Kim.

It's an incredible space, tucked between a gym and a Superior Grocers on Crenshaw Boulevard. It’s way bigger inside than it looks — at 800 seats, it’s easily one of the biggest theaters in the city. For comparison, The Chinese in Hollywood seats 932.

There are still fireproof window covers in the projection room, a holdover from old film screening safety practices. And there are “cry rooms” upstairs from the 1940s, balcony seating with speakers and a glass window where patrons could sit with a crying baby and not interrupt their viewing experience.

Kim reminisces about her father using a pole hand to change the letters on the marquee. However, she admits that she lacks the arm strength for such a technique, which led her to invest in a scissor lift.

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Kim updates the marquee letters approximately once a week to reflect the upcoming movies that will be showing at the theater.

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Now it's got that vintage hue.

“Now it's cool! It's really cool!,” says Kim. “Now that I have dreams of trying to raise money to make changes, people are like, don't change anything!”

The early days

When the Kims bought the theater, they saw an underserved audience in Gardena. There was a drive-in theater nearby in Torrance called the Roadium that played Spanish-language movies every Wednesday, and the place would be packed.

One day, Judy Kim says, her parents decided to change the format of the theater from English speaking second-run movies from Hollywood to second-run Spanish language movies. In the 1970s and the 80s, the Kims named the theater Teatro Variedades — “variety theater” in Spanish — and focused on Spanish-language films and live events with Latino filmmakers and actors. If the Torrance drive-in was ever rained out, or if folks wanted to catch a movie in Spanish on another day of the week, they’d head to the Gardena.

“It was meant to be like a neighborhood theater that was typical in the post-war era,” says Kim. “There was always a neighborhood movie theater that you could walk to from your home, just a few blocks away … all of those theaters are now gone.”

The Kims held on to their theater and in 1995 renamed it the Gardena Cinema. Judy Kim and her brother helped run the theater and neighborhood kids showed up too, offering to clean or help out in other ways in exchange for a movie ticket.

It served as a community hub.

“We were almost kind of like a Boys and Girls Club,” recalls Kim. After the movie, kids “would hang out in the lobby, and we would play video games, or talk about what was cool and what was not and, as an adult at that time, I made sure that all the kids that were here did their homework.”

“I tutored them,” she adds. “I made sure that they were doing OK in school.”

Kim always expected them to go to college.

Trouble sets in

Despite the joy found in the theater, like most teens, Judy Kim wanted to get away from her parents and spread her wings, so to speak. She left for college out east and had dreams of moving to New York and becoming a Broadway producer.

Then the calls started coming — a lot of calls from her parents. Sometimes twice a day, begging her to return to L.A. She didn’t really understand what the urgency was all about, but she came home and found her parents — and the theater’s — finances in disarray.

“I realized that they were under extreme financial hardship, and they were embroiled in lots of legal problems,” she says.

Kim explains that her parents had been defrauded multiple times. The Kims lost their house, their car. To help, Judy Kim went to law school, became a lawyer and dug in to help untangle them. It took almost 15 years to get everything sorted. “We were basically surviving off of, like, 99 cent hamburgers,” she says.

The upside in all of this — and the part of this story that might be the reason Gardena Cinema is still around — is that about five years ago, Kim negotiated the purchase of a parking lot.

It was a big-time play. Gardena is one of very few independent theaters in L.A. with its own parking and, says Kim, “it saved our butt when the pandemic came.”

“Nobody was open and I had this big parking lot that I could show movies outdoors where people could sit in their car, safely, away from other people and watch a movie,” she says. “All they had to do was tune into the FM station that I told them to tune into.”

A bumpy road to recovery

As theaters in the city started welcoming folks back inside, the Kim family then had to navigate another major loss. “That time period is when my mom was fighting cancer,” says Kim. Nancy Kim died in 2022.

An altar of Kim's mother, Nancy Soo Myoung Kim, is placed in the lobby of the theater in remembrance of her beloved mother.

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John and Judy Kim closed the theater and took a few months to grieve. Judy Kim sold her condo and moved in with her father, putting that money towards the cinema.

“And then I said to my dad, we’re running out of money.”

The Gardena Cinema reopened with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, expecting it to be a huge hit. But only 10 people showed up to the first screening. Reopening the cinema with first-run movies meant that Kim was actually losing money.

New releases are “loss leaders” for movie theaters. Most of the ticket price is going straight back to the film’s distributor, and contracts mean that new films have to be shown for a certain number of weeks. If a theater isn’t bringing in enough audience members to turn a profit on concessions, theater owners are spending more than they’re making by running a first run film.

“So 2023, I’m running out of money,” says Kim. She says her father was ready to retire and use his “senior citizen card for all the national parks.” Why not sell the theater? Neither Kim nor her brother have children, so “there’s nobody to leave the theater to,” she says.

The theater hit the market, but didn’t sell.

Judy Kim made another last ditch pivot and came up with another plan: “I’m going to set up a nonprofit organization.”

With her father’s blessing, Kim began the process in April of 2023. The theater got official recognition as a nonprofit in July. Between that and the success of summer films like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie, the Gardena Cinema had a future.

Volunteer 'grandchildren'

Judy Kim was now running a theater and a nonprofit entirely on her own. But, as she learned years earlier, you can’t underestimate the number of people willing to trade work for a free movie. It took months, but Kim now has a team of 40 volunteers who help her run the theater.

“I’ve got a really good core group of people that are very supportive.”

It’s those volunteers who convinced Kim to move away from first-run movies and start programming repertory screenings. Without the strict scheduling and tiny profit margins of a first-run movie, Kim suddenly had a lot more flexibility. If she needed to step away and take care of her father, or just close the theater on a slow night, those options were now on the table.

Movie posters adorn the lobby walls of the Gardena Cinema.

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The Gardena Cinema volunteers are invaluable to the space. They run concessions, clean the theater, sell tickets, run the projector — and this past November, Kim left the theater in their hands entirely to take a trip with her father. “They did a fantastic job … it’s still standing,” she says.

Cifen, a local filmmaker, helps organize events in the theater. He put together a singles’ night and a screening of his independent film, Age of Embellished Relic, this past February. He calls the theater a “safe haven.”

Conor Holt makes the drive to Gardena from East Hollywood. A former ArcLight Cinemas employee, he says he cares about making sure cinemas stay open. “If you care about something, you gotta go the extra mile.”

Adela Tobon used to manage a single-screen movie theater in Northern California. A friend told her about the Gardena Cinema and she says, “I just lost it. I’m like, this is exactly where I belong.”

And Bill DeFrance has taken over a lot of John Kim’s duties in the cinema — cutting trailers, ripping tickets at the box office, building the show in the projector.

It’s a family affair for DeFrance too. On Valentine’s Day, he programmed Wild at Heart — his and his wife’s favorite movie. “I programmed it for Valentine’s Day so I could be at the theater and on a date at the same time.”

A sign his daughter made hangs on the side of the ticket booth, and boldly states in red crayon: “NO PRANK CALLS!”

“For a long time, my dad was like, well, we don’t need to leave a legacy. There’s no grandkids,” says Kim. But the volunteers pipe up with a chorus: “We can be your grandchildren!”

Gardena Cinema owner Judy Kim.

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Judy Kim is now planning on leaving an endowment for the theater, so it can continue after she and her family have moved on. And intentional or not, the Gardena Cinema now has a legacy of community building and a fighting spirit.

Keep an eye on the Gardena Cinema’s calendar. You can catch anything from a karaoke party screening of La La Land to Dawn of the Dead in 3D to film festivals featuring shorts from local filmmakers.

The Trump administration would require U.S. taxpayers to disclose their citizenship and work authorization status to the IRS as part of a proposed change to the annual tax form that nearly all workers file each year.

Administration officials argue the new requirement will help the federal government stop immigrants lacking permanent legal status from collecting federal benefits they are not eligible for, potentially saving taxpayers up to $2 billion. But taxpayer and privacy advocates say the data could be used to help find and deport those people.

“It could be used as an immigration enforcement tool and that is probably the reason why they are doing this,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

Most Americans will see it as a new checkbox that gives the government even more information on taxpayers. But those living in the country illegally face a more complicated choice: Declare on a tax return that they are not authorized to live in the U.S. or lie on the return, which is a felony. Some may stop filing their taxes altogether.

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“It’s dragging the IRS into this administration’s immigration policies,” said Nina Olson, executive director for the Center for Taxpayer Rights.

The IRS posted its draft 1040 form for 2026 in late August. It includes the question, “At the time you file your return, are you, and your spouse if filing jointly, a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or an alien lawfully authorized to work in the U.S.?” There are “Yes” or “No” checkboxes for both the filer and their spouse. A draft of a second form, known as Schedule 3-A used to claim refundable tax credits, asks a similar question.

The questions are not optional. Every tax filer must certify under penalty of law their immigration or citizenship status to the IRS to file their return.

The Treasury Department says the new question is meant to keep immigrants lacking permanent legal status from taking advantage of refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Additional Child Tax Credit. These are credits for which low- and middle income workers and families may qualify that often result in a refund back to the taxpayer.

In a statement, a Treasury Department official said the information will be “subject to a variety of privacy, disclosure and other legal protections.” The statement did not say whether the information will be shared with immigration enforcement agencies.

Despite not being authorized to live and work in the U.S., immigrants that do not have permanent legal status do pay taxes. A 2024 report by the National Taxpayer Advocate found 3.8 million tax returns where a taxpayer used an Individual Tax Identification Number, or ITIN. While an ITIN can be issued for a variety of purposes, undocumented workers who cannot obtain a Social Security number are among those who use them.

IRS data show that taxpayers who filed those nearly 4 million returns paid $14.4 billion in income taxes and $6.5 billion in Social Security and Medicare taxes.

A valid Social Security Number, not an ITIN, is required to qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. The IRS checks Social Security Numbers against Social Security Administration records for each claim of the EITC.

Because of this process, Olson said she believes the new proposal is unnecessary.

“Your citizenship or residency status is not information the IRS needs to process a return. It’s not even information the IRS needs to process these tax credits,” she said. “The IRS already has Social Security data on taxpayers, as well as ITIN information. It already has what it needs to process a return.”

Immigrants lacking permanent legal status are generally not eligible for federal benefits after Congress overhauled federal welfare programs in the mid-1990s. A tax filer needs to be a U.S. citizen or a green card holder to claim the EITC or CTC, with some limited exceptions.

But some immigrants in the U.S. who presently qualify for some of these credits would not under the new policy. This would include people covered under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, those with temporary protected status and temporary workers in the country under H1-B visas.

The Trump administration argues in its proposal that the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the law that governs who is eligible for benefit programs, should be applied to refundable tax credits as well. The research paper published this week estimates that 671,000 people, including 309,000 children, will lose the Earned Income Tax Credit under this policy. Another roughly 1.1 million people, including 574,000 children, will lose the Additional Child Tax Credit.

Most of the children that would lose eligibility to these credits are U.S. citizens, according to these researchers at Boston University, Columbia University and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, because one or more of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status.

The Trump administration has tried to use the IRS to implement its immigration policies before. Last year, the Treasury Department agreed to share confidential taxpayer information of immigrants with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the purpose of identifying and deporting people.

The data-sharing agreement was halted by a federal judge, which found that it violated federal taxpayer privacy laws, and the halt remains in effect as the case works its way through the courts. However, before it was stopped, it was found that the IRS had already turned over the addresses of 47,000 people to ICE.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The annual Día de los Muertos celebration by Self Help Graphics & Art is coming home to Boyle Heights this year. 

The block party will be held Nov. 7 outside its building on 1st and Anderson streets, and will feature live performances by Los Lobos and La Santa Cecilia. 

Self Help Graphics has been under renovation for years, with its Día de los Muertos celebration often held at the East LA Civic Center. The building is expected to reopen in 2027.

“Día de los Muertos at Self Help Graphics has always been a homecoming — a day when our community gathers to remember our loved ones through art, music, and ceremony,” said Self Help Graphics executive director Paulina Flores in a statement. “This year, that word carries even more meaning as we celebrate block-party style on Anderson Street and begin our return to our Boyle Heights home.”

The 12,000-square-foot building is being transformed into a cultural center that meets museum standards, featuring seismic retrofitting, an expanded printmaking studio, upgraded gallery lighting and a larger multipurpose room for community gatherings.

A key player in the Chicano movement of the 1970s, Self Help Graphics & Art was founded in the East LA garage of Sister Karen Boccalero, a Franciscan nun and printmaker. It started with a small group of young Latino artists who used their medium to spread social justice messages. 

From the onset, these artists involved members of the community in the process of making art and organizing programs, such as a 1972 Día de los Muertos event considered to be the first public commemoration in the United States of a tradition rooted in Mexico’s Indigenous origins. Community art workshops will also be offered this year.

Here’s what to know:

53rd Annual Día de los Muertos Celebration

Attendees will have an opportunity to record interviews with community members at an oral history station hosted by the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Self Help Graphics teaching artists will help attendees create miniature altars.

Details:

2 p.m. — A ceremonial procession featuring Aztec dancers will guide attendees from Mariachi Plaza to Self Help Graphics & Art

Community art workshop series

Self Help Graphics & Art is offering a series of Día de los Muertos community art workshops from 12 to 3 p.m. beginning this Saturday.

Proposition 40, also known as the billionaire tax, is the most contentious fight on Californians’ ballots this November.

The proposal to impose a one-time asset tax on the net worth of the state’s approximately 200 billionaires has divided Democrats, galvanized progressives and sparked fierce pushback from business groups and the state’s wealthy tech sector. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has poured more than $138 million into the campaign against the measure — including two countermeasures, Propositions 41 and 42 — and is among a handful of billionaires who have moved residences or business assets out of the state in an attempt to avoid the proposed tax. In total, opponents have raised more than $205 million to stop Prop. 40, according to campaign finance records.

It would also set up an entirely new system of taxes in a state that doesn’t traditionally tax wealth. That would be challenging to implement and experts say is sure to invite litigation. Here are some common questions and answers about how the measure would work.

How would the state assess the tax?

Aside from local taxes on real estate and some business equipment, California isn’t in the business of valuing and taxing personal property.

Prop. 40 would require the state, within six months, to create a way to assess the value of a wide range of holdings: billionaires’ stock, investment accounts and business interests, but also their art collections, wine vaults, cars and anything else that stores wealth.

“I have a client who has a machine gun collection,” said Jon Feldhammer, a San Francisco tax attorney who said he is advising several clients who would be or believe they could be subject to the billionaire tax.

The definition of wealth and property has to be broad to close possible loopholes, said Kirk Stark, a UCLA tax law professor.

“Otherwise there would be a very simple workaround, which is, if there’s something that’s exempt then you know there would be an incentive to just shift wealth from one form to another,” Stark said.

Ensuring those subject to the tax aren’t underreporting their assets would require the state’s Franchise Tax Board to hire more people for appraisals and auditing, Stark said.

“It can be done,” he said. “But it’s going to take a huge investment of resources to actually pull it off.”

Franchise Tax Board spokesperson Andrew LePage declined to say how many staff the agency would need to implement Prop. 40. Currently, the board doesn't appraise property but sometimes auditors "examine asset values reported by taxpayers to ensure accuracy," he said.

Chris Parker, a former attorney for the tax board who now works as a tax attorney with the firm Baker Tilly, said the board has “no way of knowing anyone’s net wealth.”

Ariel Jurow Kleiman, a tax policy professor at the University of Southern California, doesn’t think the state would have a hard time putting the tax into effect. Stocks, which make up a substantial part of billionaires’ wealth, are easily valued, she said. For more “bespoke” property like art and jewelry, California could look to the Internal Revenue Service’s federal tax on inherited property.

“There are commonsense methods like looking at comparable assets or looking to available markets to see how comps are valued,” she said. “We wouldn't be asking people to reinvent the wheel here.”

Experts do expect disputes over the value of privately held businesses.

Feldhammer said many startup founders have raised money for their companies but haven’t yet sold any products. He criticized the ballot measure for defining a company’s worth as the most recent amount of investment money it raised, which diverges from how the IRS calculates an asset’s fair market value for the estate tax.

“How do you value a company that is not on the public market? It doesn’t even have a product yet. It’s not making any money,” he said.

He said he expects clients to mount lengthy legal challenges arguing the law overvalues their business holdings.

“These are people who have oftentimes plenty of wealth to spend on legal fees to put up the best defense money can buy,” he said.

Will billionaires leave?

The campaign against the measure warns that billionaires will flee California, depriving the state of billions of dollars in income tax revenue that helps fund the state budget. Experts say there’s no way to know whether the tax will spark a large-scale exodus.

Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan economics professor who studies tax policy, said there’s very little evidence to gauge how billionaires could react to California’s tax, partly because the proposal is unique.

California experts considering the tax have looked at wealth taxes in European countries to try to discern the impact of Prop. 40. In 1990, 12 countries had wealth taxes. Today, only four remain. Many countries abandoned them because they were difficult and expensive to implement, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. But Slemrod said those examples are “not immediately applicable” to Prop. 40 because they differed significantly in design: Tax rates were much lower, they were intended to be permanent and the money was not earmarked for special interests.

“I wouldn’t jump from the evidence we have to California,” Slemrod said.

But one issue that could matter significantly for California, Slemrod said, is that it is much easier to move assets between states than between countries, as sometimes happened in Europe. Spain allowed its provinces to enact wealth taxes and research suggests that rich people changed residences based on tax rates.

Researchers at the Hoover Institution, a conservative policy think tank, conducted an analysis suggesting Californians need not look at history to figure out Prop. 40’s impact. Tax flight has already happened. They estimate that billionaires representing 30% of the tax base have publicly said they have left, lowering state revenue estimates by $60 billion and permanently altering California’s income tax collection.

Feldhammer, the tax lawyer, said “a third to half” of his clients have left the state over the proposed tax. He declined to say how many clients that is. Other tax lawyers told CalMatters that clients who are worth less than $1 billion are also considering moving to avoid limiting their earning potential.

Billionaires who didn’t leave before Jan. 1 would face taxes on their assets anyway; the measure would apply to anyone who was a California resident on that date.

But Feldhammer said he expects people to sue over the measure’s retroactive nature, pointing to two U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the 1920s that held it was unconstitutional to apply the federal estate and gift taxes to assets transferred before those laws were enacted. In 1994, the court ruled that retroactive taxes could be constitutional in certain limited circumstances.

Asked how he’s advising clients who are considering leaving California, Feldhammer said there’s a “reasonable argument that the law may be unconstitutionally retroactive — but to take advantage of that, you’re going to have to leave.”

Would it allow the state to tax my retirement?

If you’re not a billionaire, no.

Even for billionaires, Prop. 40 exempts pensions and individual retirement accounts from the asset tax. There are some exceptions, most notably for Roth IRAs that contain more than $10 million.

Misleading advertisements from opponents claim the tax would allow California soon to eat into retirement savings for average Californians. They’re supporting Prop. 42, which would block the proposed billionaire tax by broadly banning any new taxes on personal property such as investment, retirement and pension accounts. Brin’s political spending group, Building a Better California, put it on the ballot, and unions representing firefighters, police and construction workers support it. (If both measures pass, whichever receives more “yes” votes becomes law.)

Proponents of Prop. 42 say their measure would protect the pensions and retirement accounts of teachers, firefighters and middle-class workers from being taxed before they withdraw the money.

“A new tax on Californians’ retirement and life savings would be devastating,” Robert Gutierrez, president of the California Taxpayers Association, said in a press release.

There are no active proposals to tax those accounts on the ballot or in the Legislature. Lawmakers who have floated such wealth taxes in the past have gotten nowhere.

Still, Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, which supports Prop. 42, denied being deceptive and said it’s “within the realm of realization” for California to tax middle-class workers’ retirement accounts.

“I think it’s more important to be proactive in this area,” he said.

How would the money be used?

Proponents say the billionaire tax is intended to backfill federal cuts to the state’s expansive Medi-Cal health program for low-income residents. State officials project the cuts, enacted as part of President Donald Trump’s 2025 budget bill known as H.R. 1, could amount to $30 billion a year.

The initiative gives the Legislature broad authority to decide how to spend the money. Of the revenue, 90% percent would be put in a special fund for healthcare; the other 10% would be put in a special fund to pay for schools and food assistance like CalFresh, which was also targeted by federal cuts.

If the money is used to keep Californians on Medi-Cal, that could mean spending it on the private health insurance companies that the state contracts with to administer low-income residents’ coverage.

There is some debate over whether the money would actually offset the cuts to Medi-Cal and how strictly the language bars lawmakers from using the money for anything else.

Opponents such as the California Medical Association and Planned Parenthood recently circulated a memo arguing there’s no guarantee the money would replace the federal funding cuts, because the proposition also allows the money to offset state cuts to Medi-Cal. They warn that would allow lawmakers and the governor to use the new tax money to maintain state funding levels for Medi-Cal and free up the state’s general fund to pay for other things.

Lawmakers and governors have in the past used special new funds to simply replace existing funding. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, did it with mental health funding created by a voter-approved tax on millionaires, and then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, did it with health funding created by the state tobacco tax. More recently, doctors and hospitals accused Newsom of using a different healthcare tax to backfill the general fund. They placed Proposition 35 on the ballot in 2024 to earmark the money. Voters approved it, but the groups say some funding was still diverted.

But proponents of Prop. 40 said that concern doesn’t make sense: Those budget maneuvers, they said, are usually done to address state budget shortfalls, while Prop. 40 was already written to create funding for a shortfall.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A medical helicopter transporting a patient crashed off Catalina Island, killing two people and leaving two hospitalized, authorities said Thursday.

Rescuers continued searching Thursday for a fifth person who was aboard the aircraft and went missing after the Wednesday night crash.

The Coast Guard, area firefighters and divers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were among emergency personnel who worked through the night, Coast Guard Capt. Stacey Crecy said at a news conference.

“We’re still doing an active search for the person who’s missing and then in addition to that, the divers and the remote operated vehicle are going to get a look at more of the wreckage and hopefully if there’s a sunken fuselage … we’re hoping to get a better picture of that this morning,” Crecy said.

The cause of the crash was not immediately clear. Crecy said the helicopter went down shortly after takeoff and hit the water a short distance from the island.

Authorities were working on identifying the victims, she said.

“We believe that the medical aircraft was transporting a person off the island for additional medical care on the mainland,” Crecy said, adding she did not have more information on the transport or the patient.

First responders were called to the crash shortly before 8 p.m. Wednesday and pulled four people from the water. Two were pronounced dead at the scene and two were brought in stable condition to hospitals on the mainland, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said.

Firefighters on the island were able to get to the scene quickly by boat, Crecy said.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it is investigating and identified the helicopter as a Eurocopter EC-135-P2.

Authorities said the helicopter was submerged in 240 feet (73 meters) of water off Catalina, which is located about 22 miles (35 kilometers) off the mainland of Los Angeles County.

The helicopter was believed to be operated by REACH Air Medical Services of Sacramento, California, KTLA-TV reported. A spokesperson for its parent company, Global Medical Response, told the station that it was aware of the accident and was gathering information.

Global Medical Response did not immediately return a message seeking comment Thursday morning.