MadameNoire
Source: FREDERIC J. BROWN / Getty
Vanessa Bryant, widow of late NBA superstar Kobe Bryant, named the officers who allegedly shared photos of the helicopter crash scene where her husband and 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, died. She uploaded 12 posts on Instagram revealing portions of her lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and Fire departments to social media on Wednesday.
According to the docs, Bryant expressed concern over the privacy of the crash site and was assured by Sheriff Alex Villaneuva that the victims’ privacy would be upheld. An investigation later revealed that one deputy on the scene of the crash took between 25 and 100 photos of the scene, including some that were focused primarily on the remains of crash victims. The identities of the deputies involved were originally withheld, but a judge ruled in Bryant’s favor to have them named in early March.
Bryant highlighted the names of the four deputies, Joey Cruz, Rafael Mejia, Michael Russell and Raul Versales in her first post.
Per Bryant’s Instagram posts, Mejia reportedly stored and shared the photos “for no other reason than morbid gossip.” He allegedly sent the photos to Cruz, who would go on to share them with Russell. Those images were then shared with family members and even patrons and a bartender at a sports bar days after the tragic accident. Cruz reportedly made “crude remarks about the state of the victim’s remains” before showing the pictures to his niece. A patron who heard details about the photos from a bartender emailed a complaint to the Sheriff’s Department.
Russell, who was stationed to a checkpoint at the base of the hillside that led to the crash site, reportedly asked Cruz to send him the photos. He would go on to share them with a personal friend whom he plays video games with nightly. Russell’s friend, who is a sheriff’s deputy later, revealed that one of the photos he was presented showed the remains of a child.
Versales reportedly stationed himself at a “makeshift command post” and obtained multiple photographs of the Bryants’ remains, stored them on his personal cell phone, and shared them with several other department personnel, including Mejia.
Kobe Bryant, Gianna and seven others were killed when the helicopter they were flying in to a youth basketball tournament at his Mamba Academy crashed in Calabasas, California on January 26, 2020.
