LOS ANGELES – On the 44th anniversary of NBA legend Kobe Bryant’s birth, a lawyer for his widow, Vanessa, asked a jury in federal court here Tuesday to seek justice on behalf of him and his daughter more than two years after their deaths.
This was the 10th day of Vanessa Bryant’s civil trial against Los Angeles County, another day of tears for her and the final day of testimony after hearing dozens of witnesses. It was also the first day of closing arguments and the first time attorneys put a dollar amount on what they want the jury to award to Bryant and Chris Chester, her co-defendant at this trial:
$75 million.
Chester’s attorney, Jerome Jackson, asked for up to $2.5 million each for their past 2.5 years of emotional distress, plus up to $1 million for each year of their future distress – 40 years for Bryant and 30 for Chester.
“When I get to this point of closing arguments, I’m usually careful not to overdo it,” Jackson told the jury in closing arguments. “I have no such anxiety today, because I will tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that you cannot award too much money for what they have been through. You can’t stack it too high. You can’t spread it too wide. What they went through is inhumane and inhumane.”
Both Bryant and Chester brought this case to trial after suing the county in 2020, several months after they each lost spouses and daughters in a helicopter crash that killed all nine on board in Calabasas, California. They don’t blame the district for the crash itself but what happened next. They both accused county sheriff’s and fire department employees of using their personal phones to take graphic photos of their deceased loved ones at the crash site despite having no legitimate business reason to do so.
The county says the photos were never posted online and were deleted shortly after the crash. But Bryant and Chester say they live in fear of the photos resurfacing because there’s no way to be sure if they still exist somewhere, ready to emerge at any moment.
“Forty-four years ago today, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Kobe Bryant was born,” Bryant’s attorney, Craig Jennings Lavoie, told the jury as he began his closing argument. “Today is his birthday. It’s an honor to stand here representing Ms. . . Bryant asking for justice and accountability on his behalf, and on her behalf, and on behalf of their daughter Gianna, who would be 16 if she were still here with us
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Bryant wore black to the trial on Tuesday and made his first public Instagram post since the trial began on August 10. It was a photo of her and Kobe with a comment:
“Happy birthday, baby! I love you and miss you so much!”
Closing arguments
Her memory soon turned to sadness in court, where the trial was nearing its end. After closing arguments resume Wednesday morning, the jury of five men and four women will be tasked with making a series of decisions about the case:
►Did these county first responders violate Bryant and Chester’s constitutional privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment by publicly disseminating these crash scenes, allegedly because they wanted to use them as “souvenirs” or objects of amusement?
►If so, is the county responsible for it as an organization?
►And if so, how much should the jury award them for their past and future emotional distress?
Jennings Lavoie walked the jury through key points of the evidence in the trial, including the conflicting statements of those who took and shared the photos, as well as the two main public events at which county workers shared crash-scene photos. One involved fire chief Tony Imbrenda showing crash photos at an awards ceremony in February 2020, when a witness testified that she heard the photos included an image of Kobe’s “burnt” body, which Imbrenda denied at trial.
In another case, Jennings Lavoie told the jury that the “clearest example” of a violation came from sheriff’s deputy Joey Cruz, who showed crash scene photos at a restaurant bar two days after the crash.
Jennings Lavoie also brought up the case of a fire captain, Brian Jordan, who walked the scene after the crash taking unnecessary photos of dead bodies, according to the fire department.
One fire department witness, acting Chief Anthony Marrone, testified that Jordan once sent him a text about the location of Gianna Bryant’s remains in a ravine at the crash site.
“Based on that lead Marrone understood that Brian Jordan saw her in that ravine,” Jennings Lavoie said.
Jennings Lavoie then accused Jordan of taking “personal memorial photos of a deceased child, not for any commercial purpose, but because he wanted to give those photos to himself, to take her home as a trophy.”
Sitting at the plaintiffs’ table in front of the jury, Bryant wiped his eyes with a tissue as Jennings Lavoie delved into this topic.
“Can you imagine?” Jennings Lavoie asked the jury. “You are charged with deciding whether this shocks the conscience. It shocks the conscience sometimes 1,000. And he publicly circulated those photos after taking them by giving them to himself and leaving the scene that day.”
In December 2020, the fire department sent Jordan a letter of its “intent to fire” him for his misuse of such photos, saying the photos “served only to appeal to baser instincts and desires for what amounted to visual gossip.” Jordan decided to retire early instead. He testified last week that he was in court on “false allegations” that he could not remember being at the crash site that day and claimed not to know who Gianna Bryant even was.
Destruction of evidence
Jordan was also asked in court last week what happened to the hard drive on his computer that was missing when he was required to hand it over to his employer. He said he had no evidence, leading the plaintiffs’ lawyers to imply that it could still contain gruesome photographs that could resurface at any time.
That was another key part of the plaintiffs’ case – the destruction of evidence. Because county employees deleted photos shortly after the crash, the plaintiffs have no way of showing exactly what was in the photos or where they went. Their lawyers instead had to elicit testimony about what they contained from witnesses and then match them with descriptions of the accident victims.
“You can assume the evidence would be bad for them,” Jennings Lavoie told the jury.
Jennings Lavoie also told the jury about the plaintiffs’ theory that the district is responsible for the conduct of its employees in that case because it did not have adequate policies or training to prevent it. He showed the jury video footage of LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva giving an interview in which he said law enforcement officers had a long tradition of taking and sharing gruesome death photos from accidents or crime scenes.
“It’s been tolerated for decades,” Jennings Lavoie told the jury.
The district disputes that, but the jury will first have to determine whether district employees violated Bryant and Chester’s rights in this case.
Chester’s attorney asked the jury to assign half of the damages as the responsibility of the sheriff’s department and half to the fire department.
“They stole his dignity and his family’s privacy,” Jackson said of his client. “They did it on purpose. They did it cruelly. They did it inhumanely. And they laughed about it, and they lied about it. And then they tried to fight it with a clumsy, sloppy and stupid cover-up where sometimes they couldn’t even keep their story straight.”
The county is scheduled to give its closing argument to the jury on Wednesday.
Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@usatoday.com
