After an 11-day civil trial that went into graphic detail about horrific photos taken and shared from the scene of a helicopter crash that killed all nine aboard in January 2020, including the NBA legend ( Kobe Bryant) and his daughter, a federal jury has awarded Kobe Bryant’s widow Vanessa $16 million.
Los Angeles County was found liable for damages against Bryant and Chris Chester, a financial adviser who lost his wife and daughter in the same crash and was awarded $15 million separately by the same jury.
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Both plaintiffs sued the county and took the case to trial not because they thought the county was to blame for the crash, but because of what happened immediately afterwards, with the taking and sharing of photos of their family members’ remains.
They asked the jurors to make decisions on three broad issues:
- Did county sheriff’s and fire department employees violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional privacy rights by displaying and sharing unwarranted photos of dead crash victims from the crash site on their personal cell phones?
- If so, was the county liable as an organization for that behavior because it failed to prevent it through policies and training, or did such violations have a long history?
- And, if that’s the case, how much should Bryant and Chester be compensated for past and future emotional distress?
After about four hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict on Wednesday, awarding victory to Chester and Bryant, who exited the courtroom holding hands with her eldest daughter Natalia. She didn’t say anything as she pushed her way through a crowd of news cameras into a black GMC Yukon with her attorney, Luis Li.
The verdict, on the other hand, was a major setback for the taxpayer-funded county, which insisted throughout the case that the photos were not publicly disseminated in accordance with federal precedent. According to the county’s legal team, the photos were never posted online and were permanently deleted shortly after the crash to prevent their further spread.
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The county’s lead outside counsel noted in a statement following the verdict that the $31 million combined verdict for the two plaintiffs fell short of the $75 million combined verdict proposed in court a day earlier by Chester’s attorney, Jerome Jackson.
“We appreciate the jury’s hard work in this case, “Mira Hashmall of the firm Miller Barondess issued a statement. “While we disagree with the jury’s findings concerning the County’s liability, we believe the monetary award demonstrates that jurors did not believe the evidence supported the Plaintiffs’ request for $75 million in emotional distress. We’ll talk about next steps with our client. Meanwhile, we hope the Bryant and Chester families are able to recover from their tragic losses.”
The jury awarded Bryant $16 million, with the sheriff’s department receiving $10 million and the fire department receiving $6 million. Similarly, the sheriff’s department received $9 million of Chester’s award, while the fire department received $6 million.
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Their attorneys told the jury that they live in fear that the photos will resurface and terrorize them and their families in the future, so the awards cover both their past and future emotional distress. 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 Brian Jordan, a fire captain who was chastised in a letter from his department for taking photos from the crash scene without a legitimate business reason.
Bryant’s attorney, Li, even questioned L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva about it during the trial on August 19.
“Sir, do you have any idea where all of the photographs went?” Li inquired.
“I believe they were all deleted,” said Villanueva.
Li then pressed him to say whether he was certain.
“God knows, and that’s all there is to it,” Villanueva said.
During the trial, the plaintiffs’ attorneys also highlighted two public incidents in which the photos were displayed or “publicly disseminated,” potentially violating the plaintiffs’ rights. Two days after the crash in Norwalk, California, a sheriff’s deputy trainee named Joey Cruz was seen on surveillance video showing his phone to the bartender and then making gestures to his torso and head. Cruz told the bartender that the photos included Kobe’s remains, but Cruz gave contradictory testimony at trial when he was forced to sit just a few feet away from Bryant’s widow.
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The complaint stated, under the subject line “Kobe,” that “there was a deputy at Baja California Bar and Grill in Norwalk who was… showing pictures of his decapitated body.”
Another whistleblower was also involved in a different incident that came to light among fire department employees during a cocktail hour at an awards gala in February 2020. According to the witness, this is 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 “burned-up” body. At trial, Imbrenda denied this, 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 also a cousin of one of the other crash victims.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys claimed that these county employees used the photos for their own amusement or as souvenirs, such as when another sheriff’s deputy sent gruesome crash photos to a friend playing the video game “Call of Duty.”
“I had no business doing that,” Michael Russell, the deputy, testified.
The jury found in favor of the plaintiffs on all but one of the questions presented to them, whether the fire department violated their rights “based on a widespread or longstanding practice or custom.” The plaintiffs won on the other liability issues, which concerned the county agencies’ failure to prevent such violations through adequate policies and training.
“The plaintiffs had strong, sympathetic cases, and the defendants’ lack of proper protocols and/or failure to enforce any that they did have made it an easy case for the jury on liability,” Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said. “And the defendants’ behavior appeared so outrageous and unnecessary that substantial damages were warranted.”
According to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, the photos spread on 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 Calabasas hills. In an effort to document the scene, Johnson said he took about 25 photos, including several close-ups of dead bodies. He then gave them to another deputy and a fire department employee who was never identified and could theoretically still have all of the photos.
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According to a letter sent to Johnson by the department in December 2020, 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.”
The photos eventually ended up with Cruz and Imbrenda, among others.
“We are grateful to the court and jury for providing us with a fair trial,” Chester’s attorney, Jackson, said.
