LOS ANGELES – A federal jury has awarded Kobe Bryant’s widow Vanessa $16 million after an 11-day civil trial that went into graphic detail about gruesome photos that were taken and shared from the scene of a helicopter crash that killed all nine aboard in January 2020, including the NBA legend and his daughter.
The nine-member jury found Los Angeles County liable for damages against Bryant and Chris Chester, a financial adviser who lost his wife and daughter in the same crash and separately was awarded $15 million by the same jury.
Both plaintiffs sued the county and brought the case to trial not because they believed the county was responsible for the crash but because of what happened right afterward with the taking and sharing of photos of their family members’ remains.
They asked the jurors to decide three general questions:
- Did county sheriff’s and fire department employees violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional privacy rights when these employees used their personal cell phones to display and share gratuitous photos of dead crash victims from the crash site?
- If so, was the county liable for that conduct as an organization because it failed to prevent it?
- And if that’s the case, what should Bryant and Chester be awarded in damages for their emotional distress?
The jury gave its answer Wednesday after about four hours of deliberations, handing a big defeat to the taxpayer-funded county, which insisted throughout the case that the photos were not publicly disseminated under the standard required by federal precedent. The county’s legal team said the photos never were posted online and were forever deleted shortly after the crash in an effort to prevent their further spread.
Bryant and Chester didn’t buy it. They said they live in fear that the photos will one day re-emerge to terrorize them and their families. They cited evidence of several people who possessed or received the photos but were never identified, as well as the missing computer hard drive of a fire captain, Brian Jordan, who was rebuked in a letter from his department for taking photos from the crash scene without having a legitimate business reason for doing so.
Bryant’s attorney, Luis Li, even asked L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva about this at the trial Aug. 19.
“Sir, you have no idea, do you, where all of the photographs went, do you?” Li asked him.
“I believe they were all deleted,” Villanueva replied.
Li then pressed him if he knew for sure.
“God knows, and that’s about it,” Villanueva said.
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At the trial, the plaintiffs’ attorneys also emphasized two public incidents in which the photos were displayed or “publicly disseminated,” arguably violating the rights of the plaintiffs. One was two days after the crash at a restaurant bar in Norwalk, California, when a sheriff’s deputy trainee named Joey Cruz was shown on surveillance video showing his phone to the bartender and then making gestures to his torso and head. The bartender said Cruz described the photos as including Kobe’s remains, but Cruz gave conflicting testimony at trial when he was forced to sit on the witness stand just a few feet away from Bryant’s widow.
That incident came to light when a patron at the restaurant that night filed a complaint on the sheriff’s department’s website after the bartender approached his table to tell him what Cruz had shown him.
Under the subject line “Kobe,” the complaint said, “There was a deputy at Baja California Bar and Grill in Norwalk who was . . . showing pictures of his decapitated body.”
Another whistleblower also played a role in a different incident coming to light among fire department employees at an awards gala during cocktail hour in February 2020. This was when fire captain Tony Imbrenda showed crash-scene photos on his phone to a group, including one who walked away saying he had just seen Kobe’s “burnt-up” body, according to the witness. Imbrenda denied this at trial, but one of Bryant’s attorneys asked the jury to consider who was more credible: Imbrenda or the woman who reported what she heard – a former emergency medical technician who is married to a city fireman.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys said these county employees used the photos for their own personal amusement or souvenirs, such as when another sheriff’s deputy sent gruesome crash photos to his friend playing the “Call of Duty” video game.
“I had no business doing that, no,” the deputy, Michael Russell, testified.
The attorneys said the spread came from the morning of the crash, when one deputy, Douglas Johnson, hiked up through rough and foggy terrain to arrive at a grisly scene where body parts and debris lay scattered in the hills of Calabasas. Johnson said he took about 25 photos including several close-ups of dead bodies in an effort to document the scene. He then passed them on to another deputy and a fire department employee who never was identified and theoretically still could have all the photos.
Johnson also said he guided Jordan around the scene, where he took photos that his department determined only served to appeal to “baser instincts” and had no “intel or safety value,” according to a letter sent to him by the department in December 2020.
The photos eventually ended up with Cruz and Imbrenda and who knows who else.
