Vanessa Bryant leaves court during testimony about crash photos shared at bar after Kobe’s death
showed him photos from the crash scene two days after the accident.
They were gruesome.
“Did you see a human torso in the photo that you understood to be Kobe Bryant?” asked one of Bryant’s attorneys, Craig Jennings Lavoie.
“Yes,” replied the former bartender, Victor Gutierrez.
This was Day 2 of Bryant’s civil trial against Los Angeles County – a day that delved into graphic details from the crash scene and featured testimony from five witnesses, including the former bartender in Norwalk, California.
Gutierrez said the deputy trainee, Joey Cruz, asked him at his bar that night if he wanted to see a photo of Kobe Bryant’s body.
“Did you also see what appeared to be a girl in any of the photos?” Lavoie asked.
“They were just parts,” Gutierrez said. “I don’t know if they were men or women.”
Bryant cried, then got up, left and didn’t return Thursday. She sued the county last year, accusing county sheriff’s and fire department employees of taking and sharing photos of her deceased loved ones from the crash scene despite not having a government reason for doing so. She is joined at the trial for this case by plaintiff Chris Chester, who lost his wife and daughter in the same crash and is suing the county for the same reasons.
Wednesday’s dramatic opening statements, Thursday’s events gave the jury much to consider:Vanessa Bryant trial Day 1: Tears, testimony and details about deadly crash
MORE:Lakers GM Rob Pelinka weeps during his testimony at trial
Citizen complaint from bar
After Gutierrez testified, another patron at the restaurant that night took the stand. His name is Ralph Mendez Jr., a real estate investor who filed a complaint with the sheriff’s department after Gutierrez told people at his table about the photos shown by Cruz.
That complaint eventually led to this trial.
On Thursday, Mendez described his reaction to what Gutierrez told him that night.
“I was in disbelief of everything I heard,” said Mendez, who also described it as a “sense of betrayal” by Cruz, a law enforcement officer entrusted with protecting the community. Mendez filed his complaint on the sheriff’s website later that night from the driveway of his home.
Under the subject line “Kobe,” the complaint said, “There was a deputy at Baja California Bar and Grill in Norwalk showing pictures of his decapitated body.”
Mendez later was contacted about the complaint by sheriff’s captain Jorge Valdez. But when a Los Angeles Times reporter asked Valdez about the complaint before it became public in February 2020, Valdez denied being aware of it.
Audio of that interview was played in court for the jury.
“I’m unaware of any complaint,” Valdez said in the audio from February 2020.
Asked his reaction to this in court Thursday, Mendez called Valdez a liar.
“He’s lying,” said Mendez.
Eliciting gruesome details
Earlier in the day, Bryant stayed out of the courtroom during testimony from a captain of the county coroner’s office, Emily Tauscher.
Unlike the sheriff’s and fire departments, the coroner’s office is not accused of misusing photos from the crash scene. But it did have more than 1,000 of them as part of its duties, leading Tauscher to the witness stand Thursday, where she shared graphic details about the mutilated condition of the victims after the high-velocity crash.
Her testimony underscored a cruel irony about this case. Bryant’s and Chester’s attorneys say their clients live in fear of these gruesome death photos reemerging one day and are haunted by the thought of that. But they also are eliciting graphic details from witnesses in open court about the photos and the condition of the bodies from the crash site – to the point that Bryant stayed out of the courtroom twice because of it.
This is being done for a reason, according to Bryant’s attorney, Luis Li.
“Because (county) defendants deny that photos taken and shared by their personnel depicted the remains of plaintiffs’ loved ones, and because they deleted those photos or failed to preserve them, plaintiffs must present witness testimony about what defendants’ photos depicted,” Li stated in a court document filed Wednesday.
Pelinka finishes testimony
The day began with about 40 minutes of testimony from Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka, who initially took the stand Wednesday as the first witness of the trial.
He testified that Bryant expressed to him that if the crash photos are ever seen by her children “she didn’t know if she could go on.”
He said he did not see such photos, but if he did, “it would be an image I could never get out of my head.”
And he would want them gone forever.
“I would want them destroyed and removed from the universe,” Pelinka said.
The county has argued the photos don’t appear to exist anymore because they were deleted for similar reasons – to keep them from spreading further and to protect the victims’ families.
An internal investigation found the photos went to the devices of 28 sheriff’s personnel, in addition to fire personnel, according to court records. Testimony about the fire department’s handling of these photos is expected Friday morning in a trial that could stretch across two weeks.
Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. E-mail: bschrotenb@usatoday.com