Kobe Bryant crash photos trial is on and according to his wife Vanessa Bryant who testified at the trial, she can’t escape what she felt over those graphic photos from the crash via USA Today;
Vanessa Bryant broke down and cried on the witness stand here Friday in federal court, wiping her eyes and struggling through much of her testimony as she described her reaction to a troubling discovery in February 2020.
She remembers it vividly. She was in a game room watching television with her family and friends when another friend called her to share the news:
Gruesome photos of her deceased daughter and husband, Kobe, the NBA legend, had apparently been taken and shared after they died in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26, 2020. Two days after the accident, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy trainee even showed grisly crash scene photos to a bartender at a Mexican restaurant.
“I bolted out of the house, and I ran to the side of the house so my girls couldn’t see me,” Bryant testified. “And I broke down and cried and just felt like I wanted to run. I just wanted to run down the block and just scream … like wanting to run down the pier and just taking your clothes off and running and jumping into the ocean. But the problem is I just can’t escape. I can’t escape my body. I can’t escape what I feel.”
This was Day 8 of Bryant’s civil trial against Los Angeles County, arguably the biggest day of the trial so far because it was the first day the jury of five men and four women heard from Bryant and the county sheriff, Alex Villanueva. Bryant brought this case to trial after filing a lawsuit that accused county sheriff’s and fire department employees of using their personal phones to take and share gratuitous photos of human remains from the crash scene despite having no legitimate business reason for doing so.
Bryant answered questions on the stand for nearly three hours and covered several key areas of the case, including why she filed this lawsuit, how she learned of the crash and how the photos issue has affected her. She said she has suffered panic attacks about it, to the point she says it feels like she can’t breathe.
“I live in fear every day,” Bryant testified, implying the photos could re-emerge at any moment, even though the county says they were deleted soon after the crash and were never posted online.
Bryant said she says a special prayer every night for her husband and daughter and thinks about “why they’re not here.”
“And then I think about what was done to them,” she said under direct examination by her attorney, Luis Li.
Bryant noted her husband’s body was recovered on the day of the crash, but her daughter’s body was not recovered until the next day.
“Her body was found in a ravine, so anyone who has photographs of her, they would have had to go out of their way,” Bryant said through tears. “So they violated her, taking advantage of the fact that her daddy couldn’t protect her. He was at the morgue.”
Flip to the next page for more from the trial.
