Vanessa Bryant’s trial has started and according to reports, the first day of the trial was all tears, testimony, and details about the deadly crash that took away her lovely husband Kobe Bryant via USA Today;
Kobe Bryant’s widow, Vanessa, wept quietly and dabbed her eyes with tissue here Wednesday as she listened to her attorney describe a series of events that made the worst day of her life “unbearably worse” – to the point that she continues to live in fear and terror over it more than two years later.
This was Day 1 of her civil trial against Los Angeles County, a legal battle more than two years in the making after nine died in a helicopter crash in January 2020, including Kobe Bryant, the beloved Los Angeles Lakers legend, and Gianna Bryant, their daughter.
Vanessa Bryant sat in the federal courtroom wearing a black mask and black suit, next to her attorney, Luis Li, who got right to the point in front of the jury of 10.
“January 26, 2020, was and always will be the worst day of Vanessa Bryant’s life,” Li told the jury. “The county did not cause the helicopter to crash … But county employees exploited the accident, took and shared pictures of Kobe’s and Gianna’s remains as souvenirs and betrayed the sacred trust we place in them. They poured salt in an unhealable wound. When they did that, they violated the constitution. That is why we are here, you are here, we are all here in federal court today, to try to right that wrong.”
And so it began Wednesday on an afternoon filled with graphic descriptions of the crash scene, a dueling version of events from each side and grief-stricken testimony from Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka, Bryant’s good friend and the first witness to take the stand. The case was brought to trial by two lawsuits: one by Bryant and another by Chris Chester, a financial adviser who also was present in court after losing his wife, Sarah, and daughter, Payton, in the same crash.
Both plaintiffs accuse county sheriff’s and fire department employees of taking and sharing photos of their loved ones’ remains at the crash scene without having a legitimate government reason for doing so. Both said they suffered emotional distress because of it and are seeking damages to be determined at trial. But the county is fighting back, saying the plaintiffs’ cases are not supported by evidence. In turn, this has created two very different accounts of what happened, as explained in opening statements by each side.
The jury will have to decide which version to believe:
Were the county first responders mostly heroes who were doing their jobs at the crash scene, fighting through fog and difficult terrain to document the accident with photos?
That is how the county’s outside counsel, Mira Hashmall, described it to the jury while acknowledging “there were mistakes.” One of those mistakes came two days after the crash, when a sheriff’s deputy trainee, Joey Cruz, showed gruesome crash photos to a bartender at a bar, leading a bar patron to file a complaint with the sheriff’s department later that night. “In a moment of weakness, he showed those photos,” Hashmall said. “He regrets it.”
Or were some of these county employees mostly villains who had no reason to take those photos except for their own amusement and sick sense of humor, as suggested by Li and the attorney for Chester, Jerome Jackson?
Flip to the next page for more videos from the first day of the trial.
