Vanessa Bryant on Wednesday named Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies who allegedly shared grim photos of the helicopter crash that killed her husband, Kobe Bryant, their daughter Gianna and seven others.
The revelation came after a legal battle with lawyers in LA County who tried to keep the identities of the deputies secret. A federal judge sided with Vanessa Bryant this month, saying the names of police officers accused of misconduct should not be kept out of the public eye.
Bryant’s attorneys filed an amended copy of a lawsuit that Bryant filed against the country and the deputies, which contains the names of four deputies who investigated the sheriff’s officials for allegedly sharing photos of the crash site. The revised lawsuit also contains new details about what the deputy investigators told internal affairs about how widely they shared the images. Bryant’s legal team based their new claims on a report on internal affairs transmitted by the Sheriff’s Department of LA County.
According to the lawsuit, the deputies involved are Raul Versales, Rafael Mejia, Joey Cruz and Michael Russell. The deputies did not respond to emails to comment. Elizabeth Gibbons, a lawyer who represented the group in an administrative process over the photos, said deputies declined to comment. Gibbons also declined to comment, saying she was reviewing the amended complaint.
The accident happened on the morning of January 26, 2020 in dense fog when Kobe and Gianna Bryant, the pilot and six other people from Orange County were on their way to Thousand Oaks for a youth basketball game. The pilot, who apparently became disoriented by the poor vision, crashed against the side of a hill in Calabasas and killed everyone on board.
In the case, it is alleged that Versales obtained several photos of the accident scene while on a temporary commando post near the accident scene and shared it with members of the sheriff, including Mejia and a detective.
Mejia stored the images on his personal cell phone and shared them with at least two people, including a deputy who controlled the traffic at the scene, the lawsuit says.
In a January 30 memo to the Sheriff’s Department’s Lost Hills Station, Mejia wrote that he had received and sent the photos “to answer questions about the color, numbers and features of the aircraft, as well. as details of accident scene, “according to the lawsuit. But in an interview two months later, he admitted to investigators that he had no legal reason to send the photos to the traffic department.
“Curiosity got the best of us,” he said, according to the lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, Mejia also shared the photos with Cruz, a student in the department at the time, who then sent them to Russell. Two days later, while at his mother’s house, Cruz showed the photos to his niece. On the same day, at the Baja California Bar and Grill in Norwalk, he was talking about the scene of the accident and was caught on the bar’s security camera and zoomed out while showing it to the bartender.
The bartender described the images to a group sitting at a table. One patron, so upset at what he heard, lodged a complaint with the sheriff’s department. The Times reviewed a copy of the complaint. The agency tried to keep the lid on the episode, and only investigated after The Times announced that deputies had taken photos and shown them to others.
Russell, meanwhile, stored the photos in an album on his personal phone so he would not have to go to his text messages to see them, the lawsuit alleges. Two days after the crash, he shared it with a friend – a Santa Clarita station deputy with whom he played video games every night – and noted in a text that one of the victims was Kobe Bryant, according to the lawsuit. That friend told investigators that one of the images was the remains of a child.
The lawsuit alleges that one deputy took 25 to 100 photos at the scene and that the photos were quickly distributed via text and phone sharing technology over the next 48 hours.
The lawsuit also alleges that several subjects of the investigation were unsure about how their cell phones were functioning and whether photos could not be traced. For example, when Home Affairs investigators asked one deputy if he had checked his cloud account to determine if the illegal photos were stored there, he said: ‘I do not know how. I do not know how to get into the cloud. ”
The author of the Times, Richard Winton, contributed to this report.