“I broke down and cried,” Bryant stated of the day in February 2020 when she first discovered of the dissemination of the grisly photos taken a month earlier after which shared by a deputy with a buddy at a bar and by a firefighter at a gala, amongst different situations. “I just felt like I wanted to run down the block and scream.”
Bryant’s testimony, in a federal courthouse just a few miles from the downtown area the place her late husband led the Lakers to 5 championships, marked the emotional climax of a authorized saga that has escalated since shortly after the January 2020 crash. The case has raised questions on how the alleged misconduct was dealt with by high officers for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and Fire Department.
Bryant, typically testifying via tears, stated she lives in concern that photos of the stays of her family members will floor on social media and blamed authorities for circulating pictures she stated they need to have by no means taken in the primary place.
“They violated her,” Bryant stated of her daughter Gianna, 13, “taking advantage of the fact that her daddy couldn’t protect her because he was at the morgue.”
Bryant’s fellow plaintiff in the civil rights lawsuit, Chris Chester, beforehand had testified that studying concerning the dissemination of the photos had led to “grief on top of grief.” He dismissed the thought, superior by county attorneys, that first responders had taken and shared photos for respectable causes.
“It never crossed my mind, in the wildest imagination, that someone with a personal cellphone with a Los Angeles Dodgers sticker on that back” would take photos on the rugged accident scene above Calabasas, Calif., and share them with others, Chester stated.
But Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who additionally testified Friday, maintained {that a} deputy who took cellphone photos — a few of which have been close-ups of physique components — after which shared them with others was involved with recording the scene earlier than it was trampled by firefighters or onlookers.
Attorneys for Bryant and Chester challenged Villanueva with recordings of earlier media interviews in which the sheriff said there was no respectable purpose for his deputies to have taken cellphone photos on the scene and referred to “death books” in which police acquire footage as illicit souvenirs of their profession.
“I tell the truth as best I know it at the time,” stated Villanueva, who’s going through a challenger in a runoff election. He defended his dealing with of the scandal, which included granting “amnesty” to any deputies who deleted the photos from their telephones — as a substitute of trying to protect them as proof of misconduct.
Villanueva stated his major objective was ensuring the photos didn’t disseminate additional. “You can’t have the accountability and risk the photographs getting out,” Villanueva stated. “You have to pick one of the two. And we made the right choice.”
The trial, which can enter its third week Monday, has had just a few bruising moments for county officers.
A retired hearth captain, who a sheriff’s deputy testified had taken cellphone photos on the scene, claimed he no longer remembered being there — contradicting earlier deposition testimony — and needed to take a number of breaks from testifying to gather himself. A high sheriff’s official apologized on the stand for obvious lies he instructed regarding whether or not a grievance had been filed a couple of deputy sharing photos of the scene. And forensic evaluation discovered disappearing telephones and different {hardware} that will have make clear the unfold of the photos, together with a hearth official’s laptop computer discovered to be lacking a tough drive.
Such embarrassing revelations typically are precluded from being aired in court docket via a monetary settlement. But in this case, with Vanessa Bryant price tons of of hundreds of thousands, no such settlement has been reached.
Laurie Levenson, a professor of regulation at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, stated the wealth and willpower of one of many plaintiffs made for an uncommon dilemma for the county. “If this case wasn’t about Kobe Bryant and if the plaintiff didn’t have the resources to pursue this to trial, I doubt that it would have ever gotten this far,” Levenson stated. “For the Bryant family, they want accountability, and they have the resources to get it.”
Bryant, 40, described her resolve rising when she obtained Kobe’s and Gianna’s clothes that they have been sporting in the course of the accident. By the situation of the garments, she stated, “you could tell that they suffered” — which made her angrier in her perception that first responders had handled photos of their stays as a novelty.
“I want justice for my husband and my daughter,” Bryant stated.
Both Bryant and Chester, whose spouse and daughter have been killed in the crash, stated that they had no confidence in county assurances that all the cellphone photos taken on the scene would by no means floor.
“I believe that they were all deleted,” Villanueva testified Friday — his proof being that the photos had not, to his data, been shared on-line.
But Villanueva, who stated in a earlier deposition that he believed the photos had unfold to twenty-eight telephones, additionally appeared to study for the primary time Friday that one in every of his deputies acknowledged sending through Airdrop dozens of such photos to a hearth captain who by no means has been recognized.
The sheriff’s confidence that each one photos have been eradicated grew to become that he was “pretty sure” they have been gone. When challenged additional by Chester’s lawyer as to how he might know that, Villanueva continued to hedge.
“God knows,” the sheriff concluded. “And that’s about it.”