Weeks after the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna along with seven other people in January 2020, several Los Angeles police officers were suspended from employment and salary after making known that days after the accident one of them was
Seducing a girl in a bar showing a harsh images of the bodies of the victims he had taken in the place where the helicopter crashed.
Vanessa Bryant, the widow of the NBA star, was “devastated” by learning about what happened and brought a millionaire demand against the Sheriff’s office.
Now the County of Los Angeles wants to submit it to a psychiatric assessment to check whether the filtration of those photos caused him emotional stress, as she alleges in her complaint, in which she claims “tens of millions of dollars” for damage
caused.
In a resource, the county defends himself alleging that the alleged mental and emotional damage that Vanessa Bryant would have suffered “were not caused by the behavior of the agents but by the tragic accident” in which his husband and daughter died.
“The plaintiff can not suffer stress for some photos that she never came to see because they were not publicly disseminated,” according to judicial documents published by the local press.
The legal team of the widow of Kobe Bryant lamented the county’s request and insisted that agents raped their right to privacy by taking the images “for personal gratification”.
“No expert is needed, much less a psychiatric assessment, to assess the nature and extension of emotional stress caused to our client for this inappropriate behavior,” she said to her lawyers in a statement.
The demand was presented against the Los Angeles County, the Sheriff’s office and the city’s fire department, as well as against four police officers who were identified as Joey Cruz, Rafael Mejía, Michael Russell and Raul Versales.
The Court in charge of the case has set an audience for the next November 5 and the start of the trial is scheduled for February 2022.
Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna died on January 26, 2020 along with seven other people after the helicopter in which they traveled will crash in a mountainous area of the municipality of Calabasas, on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
According to the conclusions of the research that was carried out by the authorities, the helicopter pilot was disoriented in the middle of the fog and ended up losing control of the device.
Both Vanessa Bryant and the relatives of the other deceased submitted a negligence demand against the pilot, identified as Ara Zobayan and who also died in the accident, and against the helicopter’s own company, with which they were sought by financial compensation.
A year later, they reached an extrajudicial agreement that the terms have never been known.
