Kobe’s Wife Says She Wanted To Run And Scream When She Learned Accident Photos

A jury awarded Vanessa Bryant $16 million in her lawsuit against Los Angeles County for improperly disclosing photos of human remains in the helicopter crash that killed her husband, Kobe Bryant, and their daughter. , Gianna, with seven others.
Chris Chester, whose wife Sarah, 45, and daughter Payton, 13, were among those killed in the crash and who joined the lawsuit, will receive $15 million.

Vanessa Bryant, who wore a face mask in court, put her hands over her head and burst into tears as the verdict was read. Chester was looking straight ahead.

Jerry Jackson, Chester’s attorney, said he and the plaintiffs were grateful to the jury and Judge John F. Walter, “who gave us a very fair trial.” Bryant and his lawyers declined to comment after the verdict was read.

Mira Hashmall, the city’s lead attorney on the case, said in a statement that she and other members of the county’s legal team disagreed with the verdict.

“We will discuss next steps with our client,” she said. “In the meantime, we hope the Bryant and Chester families continue to recover from their tragic loss.”

Kobe Bryant, a star for the Los Angeles Lakers, reached a stature in Southern California that far transcended basketball. On Wednesday, about 14 blocks from the courthouse, a new mural celebrating his legacy was unveiled to mark “Mamba Day,” in reference to his nickname.

The jury’s decision, which ended a nearly two-week federal civil trial, was an unusually high-profile rebuke to two colossal, insular agencies — the Los Angeles County Police Department and the Los Angeles County Fire Department — that exercise enormous power in the second largest metropolis in the United States.

On a cloudy Sunday morning in January 2020, Bryant, 41, and eight others were flying from Orange County to a youth basketball tournament in a suburb north of Los Angeles, when the pilot became disoriented in the clouds. The helicopter crashed into a hill near Calabasas, Calif., and everyone on board died.

As news of the crash and the identity of the victims spread around the world, law enforcement officers, investigators, journalists and Bryant fans flocked to the crash site, over rough terrain.

In the first hours after the incident, Vanessa Bryant pointed out in her lawsuit, Los Angeles County firefighters and sheriffs were allowed to take unnecessary photos of human remains around the site, including the bodies of Kobe and Gianna Bryant, and the photos were shared between delegates and firefighters.

Vanessa Bryant testified in court that a few days after the moving public memorial to her husband, to whom she had been married for nearly 20 years, she was told about a Los Angeles Times report that one of the officers, Joey Cruz, had shown pictures to a police officer. bartender and a bar customer, who filed a complaint with the Police Department.

“I felt like running out and just screaming,” Bryant testified. “But I couldn’t escape. I can’t escape my body.”

Another woman, a relative of some of the accident victims, testified that a fire department employee showed some of the photos at a dance where the communications team was receiving an award. She later complained to the Fire Department.

In the lawsuit, Bryant accused the county of negligence and violating its constitutional right to privacy. Her lawyers argued that orders from Fire Department and Police Department officials to delete the footage after investigations began amounted to the destruction of evidence and an attempt at concealment.

Bryant and Chester sought compensation for the emotional distress caused by concerns that the photos could appear publicly on the internet at any time.

County attorneys acknowledged that the photos were taken and shared, but argued that the effort to delete them was broad enough to prevent the photos from appearing in the past two and a half years and that, therefore, the photos were not publicly released. The photos were not presented as evidence at the trial.

“To claim privacy and then put all those details out in public defies logic,” Hashmall said.

County attorneys argued that while some city policies were violated, the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights were not. And they said law enforcement, firefighters and other first responders need the flexibility to document accident scenes before federal investigators or coroners arrive, so taking the photos was justified.

The trial was, in some ways, a typical LA celebrity legal spectacle. Bryant arrived each day at the gleaming cube-shaped federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles in a black SUV and hurried past photographers as he entered and exited the building.

Rob Pelinka, general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe’s former manager, testified at the trial, and several friends of Bryant’s, including professional football player Sydney Leroux and singer Ciara, appeared at the gallery to support her.

The lawsuit was an attempt to hold authorities accountable for behavior that Bryant and Chester’s lawyers argued “shocked the conscience”.

Throughout the trial, plaintiffs’ lawyers portrayed the sheriffs and firefighters as motivated by a kind of macabre voyeurism that they say is embedded in the culture of these agencies.

They showed a video of Deputy Alex Villanueva talking about how, “since the invention of Polaroid”, police officers created so-called books of death, documenting the bodies they saw in the course of their work.

The agencies did not have explicit policies in place that would prevent officers from taking images of human remains, so the practice continued essentially unchecked until citizens spoke out.

The agencies’ internal efforts to investigate what happened in the Bryant case were careless and incomplete, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued.

Villanueva, who testified shortly after Bryant, testified that she had offered “amnesty” to officers for presenting the footage and then deleting it.

In closing arguments, Craig Lavoie, who represented Bryant, showed the jury a flowchart of how the photos spread. There were question marks on the chart for people who, according to witness statements or official reports, received the images but whose electronic devices were never investigated.

“If I asked all of you to give a percentage chance of these photos ending up online, I would have nine different answers,” Lavoie told the jury. “But none would be zero. And when it’s your husband, your daughter, you don’t have the luxury of cold percentages.”

Jerry Jackson, Chester’s attorney, asked the jury to consider awarding a total of up to $75 million to the plaintiffs — $2.5 million each for past suffering, plus about US$ 1 million (R$ 5.1 million) per year of life expectancy remaining, a formula that would reach US$ 30 million (R$ 153.5 million) for Chester and US$ 40 million ( BRL 204.7 million) to Bryant.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you can’t pay too much for what they went through,” Jackson said.

He asked the jury to split the burden of paying damages equally between the sheriff and the fire department; both are funded by Los Angeles County taxpayers.

In their closing arguments, county attorneys said that, ultimately, the case was about photographs that almost no one had seen.

“This is a case of photographs, but there are no photographs,” Hashmall said.

The jury disagreed, opining that the failure of both agencies to train employees on the right to privacy was a constitutional violation. They also concluded that the Police Department’s practice of taking and sharing photos of human remains violated Bryant and Chester’s constitutional rights.

The deliberation lasted less than five hours.