Widow hires Kobe Bryant-linked attorney in Georgia helicopter crash suit
The bride who survived a helicopter crash that killed her new husband just hours after they exchanged vows has sued the wedding venue and helicopter charter company, represented by the same lawyer who represented Kobe Bryant’s widow.
Jesni Sam described the hours she spent trapped under her new husband’s corpse in the wreckage of the crash, and the traumatic physical and emotional injuries she suffered, as “utterly preventable” in her lawsuit accusing the venue and charter company of negligence, saying the flight never should have taken off because of deteriorating weather conditions.
Sam is represented by the Robb & Robb law firm, which specializes in aviation law and also represented Vanessa Bryant in litigation over the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and their 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, in January 2020.
Andrew Robb, Sam’s attorney, said in a statement the lawsuit is seeking “answers and accountability” for what happened the night of the crash.
“In a matter of minutes, Jesni went from celebrating the happiest day of her life to experiencing something almost impossible to comprehend,” Robb said. “She will fight to ensure that no newlywed couple ever suffers anything like this again.”
The lawsuit names Atlanta-based Prestige Helicopters and The Revere and Revere Group, the companies behind the wedding venue, as defendants. Neither company responded to requests for comment on Tuesday afternoon, and neither has returned requests for comment on the crash since it happened this spring.
Dave Fiji and his new wife boarded the helicopter late May 29 after their Dawson County wedding for what was meant to be a romantic getaway.
According to the lawsuit, the wedding venue “offered and arranged” the helicopter send-off for Fiji and Sam.
The helicopter was “substantially damaged” when it went down around 9:50 p.m., just five minutes after it departed from the wedding venue near Dawsonville, the National Transportation Safety Board previously said.
The ride ended in calamity when the helicopter first struck tall trees along rising terrain, the NTSB said in a preliminary report in late June. The aircraft was en route to the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport.
Fiji, 25, and the helicopter’s pilot, Nikhil Nargundkar, died. Sam was injured and attended her husband’s funeral just a week after their wedding.
The NTSB’s investigation into the crash remains active, with only the preliminary report available. In that report, the agency did not conclude what caused the wreck, but described weather conditions the evening of the crash and other technical details about the incident.
Experts who reviewed the preliminary report when it was released previously told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the helicopter was likely only a few hundred feet off the ground when it crashed, that the cloud ceiling was low, and that rain and nearby thunderstorms would have deteriorated flight conditions.
The NTSB preliminary report detailed the potential for light wind, a cloud ceiling near 200 feet above ground level, overcast clouds at 600 feet above ground level, rain and fog. The lawsuit cites such conditions, as well as an advisory for aircraft that signaled embedded thunderstorms.
“This tragedy was utterly preventable. It was the consequence of a series of negligent acts and omissions by those responsible for providing, arranging, coordinating, and carrying out the helicopter send-off, including failures to adequately account for dangerous weather conditions and failures to exercise reasonable care in deciding whether the send-off should proceed at all,” Sam said in the lawsuit.
Nargundkar, the helicopter’s pilot who also died, is not named as a defendant. But Sam alleges he “failed to properly monitor and assess the weather prior to flight” and “failed to abort the flight when he knew of the low clouds and visibility and rain showers.”
Prestige Helicopters, his employer, is liable “for the negligence and carelessness of Nikhil Nargundkar,” Sam said in the suit.
Sam said that The Revere and Revere Group failed to create a procedure allowing their employees to stop or postpone a helicopter send-off “when conditions at the venue had materially deteriorated” and failed to “adequately warn” the couple about the hazards “associated with proceeding with the planned send-off under the conditions existing at the venue.”
According to Dawson County dispatch records previously obtained by the AJC, a 911 call alerting officials to a possible helicopter crash came in around 10:10 p.m. on May 29. About 90 minutes later, a drone picked up heat signatures indicating a possible wreck site. As deputies walked into the woods searching for the aircraft, one heard “what sounded like a female yelling for help,” records revealed.
Shortly before 3 a.m. May 30, after cutting through the seat belt that had trapped the injured bride inside the wreckage, deputies were able to pull her free, an incident report detailed. Fiji was also located inside the helicopter and the pilot was found nearby.
Sam said in the suit her injuries from the crash include rhabdomyolysis, a leg wound and several other physical injuries. She has also suffered emotional anguish, PTSD, depression, anxiety and a fear of flying, as well as permanent scarring to her thigh, forehead, nose, cheek and stomach, according to the suit.
At Fiji’s funeral on June 6 at Praise Community Church in Lawrenceville, his wife spoke of him fondly. The two had met about a decade ago and knew by their 20s they wanted to spend their lives together, she said.
“I saved recipes I thought he would like; I spent a significant amount of time daydreaming about our future and making all kinds of plans for us to do together and with our families. I was looking forward to cooking for him, washing his clothes, packing his meals and taking care of him the way he took care of everybody else,” Sam told a room of a few hundred mourners.
Fiji was a pilot himself. Since March 2025, he had been working as a first officer with Endeavor Air, a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, a Delta spokesperson confirmed. He graduated in 2023 from Middle Georgia State University, where he was also a flight instructor for about a year.