Jenni Rivera: Authorities confirm singer died in plane crash - Los Angeles Times
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Jenni Rivera: Authorities confirm singer died in plane crash

By Kate Mather
, Scott Gold, Todd Martens and Richard Fausset
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American aviation authorities confirmed Monday that Latin music star Jenni Rivera died Sunday in a plane crash in Mexico’s mountainous terrain.

The National Transportation Safety Board issued a statement that all seven people aboard the small plane ‘were fatally injured including Latin singer Jenni Rivera.’ The NTSB is sending investigators to Mexico to assist with the investigation, the agency said.

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Rivera, a native of Long Beach, was 43. On Sunday, Mexico’s ministry of transportation said that she had been aboard the plane and that no one had survived the crash, but did not confirm her death outright.

PHOTOS: Jenni Rivera dies in plane crash

Rivera had performed a concert in Monterrey, Mexico, on Saturday night — her standard fare of knee-buckling power ballads, pop-infused interpretations of traditional banda music and dizzying rhinestone costume changes.

At a news conference after the show, Rivera appeared happy and tranquil, pausing at one point to take a call on her cellphone that turned out to be a wrong number. She fielded questions about struggles in her personal life, including her recent separation from husband Esteban Loaiza, a professional baseball player.

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‘I can’t focus on the negative,’ she said in Spanish. ‘Because that will defeat you. That will destroy you.... The number of times I have fallen down is the number of times I have gotten up.’

PHOTOS: Jenni Rivera - Reactions to the tragic crash

Hours later, shortly after 3 a.m., Rivera is believed to have boarded a Learjet 25, which took off under clear skies. The jet headed south, toward Toluca, west of Mexico City. Rivera had been scheduled to tape in Toluca the television show ‘La Voz’ — Mexico’s version of ‘The Voice’ — on which she was a judge.

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The plane, built in 1969 and registered to a Las Vegas talent management firm, reached 11,000 feet. But 10 minutes and 62 miles into the flight, air traffic controllers lost contact with its pilots, according to Mexican authorities. The jet crashed outside Iturbide, a remote city that straddles one of the few roads bisecting Mexico’s Sierra de Arteaga national park.

Wreckage was scattered across several football fields’ worth of terrain. An investigation into the cause of the crash was underway.

An Appreciation: Jenni Rivera was a rare voice

Rivera, a mother of five and grandmother of two, was believed to have been traveling with her publicist Arturo Rivera, who was not related to her, as well as with her lawyer, hairstylist and makeup artist. Reports of their names were not consistent and their identities were not confirmed by authorities. The pilots were identified as Miguel Perez and Alejandro Torres. ‘Remember her with your heart the way she was,’ Rivera’s father, Don Pedro Rivera, told reporters in Spanish on Sunday evening. ‘She never looked back. She was a beautiful person with the whole world.’

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-- Kate Mather, Scott Gold, Todd Martens and Richard Fausset

L.A. Now
Kate Mather

Kate Mather covered crime, policing and breaking news across Southern California before leaving The Times in 2018 to attend law school. A native of Lawrence, Kan., she studied journalism at USC before first joining The Times in 2011. Mather was part of the team of reporters that received a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, as well as the team that was a Pulitzer finalist for its reporting on a deadly 2014 rampage in Isla Vista, Calif.

Scott Gold

Scott Gold is a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. Scott grew up in Charlottesville, Va., then graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in journalism and a concentration in anthropology. He wrote for newspapers in North Carolina and Florida before joining The Times in 1999. Since then, he has covered a series of national news events, including the Bush-Gore recount in 2000, the terrorist attacks in 2001, the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. He left The Times in 2015.

Todd Martens

Todd Martens is a features columnist at the Los Angeles Times who writes about theme parks and West Coast Experiences, among other topics. Martens joined the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and has covered a mix of interactive entertainment as its game critic and pop music as a reporter and editor. Previously, he reported on the music business for Billboard Magazine. Martens has contributed to numerous books, including “The Big Lebowski: An Illustrated, Annotated History of the Greatest Cult Film of All Time.†He continues to torture himself by rooting for the Chicago Cubs and, while he likes dogs, he is more of a cat person.

Richard Fausset

Former Mexico City correspondent Richard Fausset left the Los Angeles Times in 2014. He has been a community news reporter on the Westside and in South Los Angeles, a Metro section reporter covering crime, politics and features, and a national correspondent based in Atlanta. Before joining The Times in 1999, he was editor of Flagpole, the weekly newspaper in Athens, Ga. Fausset holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

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