Vanessa Bryant on Wednesday named the Los Angeles County sheriff’s delegates who reportedly shared gloomy photos of the helicopter crash that killed her husband, Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others.
The revelation came after a legal fight with LA county attorneys, who sought to keep the identity of the deputies secret. A federal judge this month supported Vanessa Bryant, saying that the names of officers accused of misconduct should not be hidden from the public.
Bryant’s lawyers filed a corrected copy of a lawsuit that Bryant filed against the county and deputies that includes the names of four deputies that Sheriff’s Department officials investigated for allegedly sharing photos of the crash site. The revised process also includes new details about what these deputies told investigators from the internal affairs department about the extent of sharing the images. Bryant’s legal team based their new claims on an internal affairs report that the LA County Sheriff’s Department filed.
According to the lawsuit, the deputies involved are Raul Versales, Rafael Mejia, Joey Cruz and Michael Russell. MPs did not respond to emails requesting comments. Elizabeth Gibbons, a lawyer who represented the group in an administrative case over the photos, said the deputies declined to comment. Gibbons also declined to comment, saying he was reviewing the amended complaint.
The accident occurred in a dense fog on the morning of January 26, 2020, when Kobe and Gianna Bryant, the pilot and six others were on their way from Orange County to Thousand Oaks for a youth basketball game. The pilot, who would have been disoriented by the poor visibility, crashed into the side of a hill in Calabasas, killing everyone on board.
The suit alleges that Versales obtained several photos of the accident scene while stationed at an improvised command post near the accident site and shared them with members of the Sheriff’s Department, including Mejia and a detective.
Mejia stored the images on his personal cell phone and shared them with at least two people, including a police officer who controlled traffic at the site, the lawsuit says.
In a January 30 memo to the Sheriff’s Department’s Lost Hills station chief, Mejia wrote that he received and sent the photos “to answer some questions about the aircraft’s color, numbers and identification characteristics, as well as details of the scene of the accident “, according to the process. But in an interview two months later, he admitted to investigators that he had no legitimate reason to send the photos to the transit chief.
“Curiosity got the better of us,” he said, according to the lawsuit.
The suit alleges that Mejia also shared the photos with Cruz, then an intern at the department, who forwarded them to Russell. Two days later, still at his mother’s house, Cruz showed the photos to his niece. That same day, at the Baja California Bar and Grill in Norwalk, he talked about working at the scene of the accident and was captured by the bar’s security camera, zooming in and out of the images while showing them to the bartender, the suit says.
The bartender described the images to a group sitting at a nearby table. A patron, so upset by what he heard, filed a complaint with the Sheriff’s Department. The Times revised a copy of the complaint. The agency tried to contain the episode, opening an investigation only after The Times revealed that deputies had obtained photos and were showing them to others.
Russell, meanwhile, saved the photos to an album on his personal cell phone so he wouldn’t have to read his text messages to see them, the lawsuit claims. Two days after the accident, he shared them with a friend – a deputy from Santa Clarita station 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 of a child’s remains.
The lawsuit says that a deputy took 25 to 100 photos on the spot and that the photos spread quickly using text and phone sharing technology over the next 48 hours.
The suit also alleges that several subjects in the investigation were unsure of how their cell phones worked and whether the photos could be recovered. For example, when internal affairs investigators asked a deputy if he had checked his account in the cloud to determine if the illicit photos were stored there, he said: “I don’t know how. I don’t know how to get into the cloud. “
The Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.