And when he showed pictures of dead bodies, he was betraying the public’s trust.” Being a deputy, I felt he had the public’s trust riding on his shoulders. “I had to inform the sheriff’s department. “I had to get it out,” he replied, becoming emotional. Mendez was asked why he made the complaint to the LASD almost immediately after leaving the bar, and even before opening his front door. “And I felt I had to do the right thing and tell the sheriff’s department what I’d seen.”Īs he sat in his car in the driveway of his Cerritos home later that night, Mendez logged on to the sheriff’s information bureau website and filled out a form, alerting the department that a deputy who had been at the Kobe Bryant crash site was “showing pictures of his decapitated body” to people at the Baja California Bar & Grill. “I was in disbelief, disappointed, disgusted and angry,” Mendez said. Mendez testified that he was shocked and upset when Gutierrez said that a sheriff’s deputy had just shown him the crash-site photos. “Is that (description) true?” one of Bryant’s attorneys asked. Mendez provided a lighter moment Thursday when asked the name of his team. “What type of human being would laugh about human remains … you’ve gotta be psycho to do that,” Gutierrez told jurors, adding that he believed the deputy came into the bar because “he just needed to talk to someone” about what he’d seen at the crash site.īut after Cruz left the bar, the video appears to show Gutierrez excitedly telling at least five people at the bar what he’d seen and seems to demonstrate in gestures the condition of the victims - including Kobe Bryant’s decapitated body.Īmong those that heard Gutierrez’s description that night was Rafael Mendez Jr., a member of a local softball team that often stopped at the bar after games. While the county admits that Cruz had a lapse of judgment when he showed the photos - which apparently also included images of the body of the Bryants’ 13-year-old daughter Gigi - all crash-site images taken by county officials have long been deleted and none were disseminated among the public.Īsked if Cruz was laughing while showing the pictures, the bartender said he was “100% sure” that the levity apparent on the surveillance video had nothing to do with the cell phone images. Vanessa Bryant and Orange County financial adviser Chris Chester, who lost his wife and daughter in the crash, are suing Los Angeles County for unspecified millions of dollars for negligence and invasion of privacy over pictures of the remains of their loved ones that they allege were needlessly snapped and shared by first responders. “I said, ‘Yeah, kinda.’ It was just (body) parts … scattered human remains.” “He said he had some photos if I wanted to see them,” Gutierrez testified. 28, 2020, when a friend, rookie Deputy Joey Cruz, came into the Baja California Bar & Grill in Norwalk for a beer and showed the bartender and a customer graphic crash site photos stored on his personal cell phone. The testimony of Victor Gutierrez focused on the night of Jan. A bartender told a federal jury Thursday of being shown gruesome cell phone images of Kobe Bryant’s remains by an off-duty Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy who had been on the scene of the helicopter crash that killed the Lakers star and eight others two days earlier.
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