Vanessa Bryant, the widow of the Los Angeles superstar Lakers Kobe Bryant, revealed parts of her lawsuit against the Los Angeles County sheriff and the Fire Department in a series of Instagram posts on Wednesday.
The 12 posts, which she shared with her 14.4 million followers, mention the police officers who allegedly shared photos of the helicopter crash scene where her husband and 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, died.
According to the case, she shared her initial concern about the privacy of the accident site almost immediately with Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Despite the guarantees provided by Villanueva at the time, a subsequent LASD investigation showed that a deputy took between 25 and 100 photos on his personal cell phone – including some focused exclusively on the victims’ remains.
Many of these photos, the lawsuit claims, were quickly shared via text message and the AirDrop feature on iPhones to other Sheriff’s Department delegates who had no connection to the investigation.
Bryant highlighted the names of the officers – Joey Cruz, Rafael Mejia, Michael Russell and Raul Versales – with red markings in their initial post. Earlier this month, she won a lawsuit against the LA County Sheriff’s Department for the names of the four deputies to be released.
Mejia reportedly stored photos of the accident site on her personal phone and shared them with others, without being asked, “for no reason other than morbid gossip,” the suit says.
Mejia also reportedly sent the photos to Cruz, an intern assistant in the Sheriff’s Department, who shared the photos with Russell, showed them to a family member and also proudly displayed them to clients and the bartender at a sports bar in Norwalk , California, several days later.
One of the customers at the bar, who overheard the bartender describe the bloody details of the photos Cruz showed him, emailed a complaint to the Sheriff’s Department that night.
Russell reportedly saved the photos in an album on his personal cell phone and shared the photos with a friend who worked at a different police station, with no involvement in the investigation.
Versales, a deputy in the Sheriff’s Department, reportedly obtained and shared photos from his personal cell phone on the day of the accident – including for Mejia – with individuals with no official purpose of viewing them.
The lawsuit also alleges that several of the aforementioned police officers made false statements about their possession and knowledge of the accident photos during the LASD investigation.
It has been almost 14 months since January 26, 2020, when Kobe Bryant, Gianna and seven others died when their helicopter crashed on a hillside in Calabasas, California.