Vanessa Bryant, the widow of Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant, revealed parts of her lawsuit against the Los Angeles County fire department and fire department on Wednesday.
The 12 posts, which she shared with her 14.4 million followers, name the officers who allegedly shared photos of the helicopter crash scene where her husband and 13-year-old daughter Gianna died.
According to the case, he shared his initial concern for the privacy of the crash site almost immediately with Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Despite the assurances provided by Villanueva at the time, a subsequent investigation by the LASD showed that a deputy took between 25 and 100 photos on his personal mobile phone, including some focused solely on the remains of the victims.
Many of these photos, as the case may be, were quickly shared via text messages and the AirDrop function of iPhones to other Sheriff’s Department deputies 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 marks on their starting spot. Earlier this month he won a case against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for the names of the four deputies to be released.
Allegedly, Mejia has stored photos of the crash site on her personal phone and shared them with other people, unexpectedly, “for no other reason than morbid gossip,” the lawsuit says.
Mejia is also believed to have sent the photos to Cruz, an intern in the sheriff’s department, who shared the photos with Russell, showed them to a family member and also showed them off presumptuously to the bosses and the waiter. at a sports bar in Norwalk, California, several days later.
One of the bar patrons, who overheard the waiter describe the bloody details in the photos Cruz showed him, emailed a complaint to the sheriff’s department that night.
Russell is supposed to have saved the photos in an album on his personal cell phone and shared them with a friend who worked at a different police station with no involvement in the investigation.
Versales, a deputy from the sheriff’s department, allegedly obtained and shared photos from his personal cell phone on the day of the accident, including in Mejia, with people with no official purpose of seeing them.
The lawsuit also alleges that several of the appointed officers made false statements about their possession and knowledge of the photographs of the accident during the LASD investigation.
It has been almost 14 months since January 26, 2020, when Kobe Bryant, Gianna and seven other people died when the helicopter they were occupying crashed into a hill in Calabasas, California.