Vanessa Bryant, the widow of Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant, revealed in a series of Instagram posts Wednesday parts of her lawsuit against the Los Angeles County sheriff and fire department.
The 12 posts, which she shared with her 14.4 million followers, cite the agents who reportedly shared photos of the helicopter crash where her husband and 13-year-old daughter Gianna died.
According to the case, she almost immediately shared her initial concerns about the privacy of the crash site with Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Despite Villanueva’s assurances at the time, a later investigation by the LASD found that a deputy took between 25 and 100 photos on his personal cell phone – some of which focused solely on the victims’ remains.
Many of those photos, the lawsuit alleges, were quickly shared via text message and the AirDrop feature on iPhones with other Sheriff’s Department deputies unrelated to the investigation.
Bryant marked the agents’ names – Joey Cruz, Rafael Mejia, Michael Russell and Raul Versales – with red marks on her first post. Earlier this month, she won a case against the LA County Sheriff’s Department to release the names of the four deputies.
Mejia allegedly stored photos of the crash site in his personal phone and shared them with others unsolicited “for no other reason than morbid gossip,” the suit said.
Mejia also reportedly sent the photos to Cruz, a deputy in training at the Sheriff’s Department, who shared the photos with Russell, showed them to a family member, and also boastfully displayed them to customers and the bartender at a sports bar in Norwalk, California. , a few days later.
One of the patrons at the bar, overhearing the bartender describing the gory details of the photos Cruz had shown him, sent a complaint to the sheriff later that evening.
Russell allegedly saved the photos in an album on his personal cell phone and shared the photos with a friend who worked at another police station without being involved in the investigation.
Versales, a Sheriff’s Department deputy, is said to have obtained and shared photos from his personal cell phone on the day of the crash – including with Mejia – with individuals with no official goal to view them.
The lawsuit also alleges that several of the said officers made false statements about their possession and knowledge of the crash photos during the LASD investigation.
It’s been nearly 14 months since January 26, 2020, when Kobe Bryant, Gianna, and seven others were killed when the helicopter they were occupying crashed into a hill in Calabasas, California.