Rob Pelinka talked about his relationship with Kobe and his wife.
He was a witness in the trial of LA County.
The crash site was visited by Pelinka and Bryant six months later.
Lakers General Manager Rob Pelinka and Bryant's widow took an all-terrain vehicle up the hill where the helicopter went down, six months after the crash that killed nine people.
Pelinka told jurors in a federal Los Angeles court that Bryant and his friend paid homage to Kobe and his wife.
Pelinka fought back tears as she said that part of her journey of grief and healing was that she wanted to touch the soil from where they died. They were with us.
After photos of the helicopter crash site were shared by LA County Fire Captains, Pelinka's testimony began on the first day of the trial. After the crash, he gave a glimpse into Bryant's emotional state, and how her distress was compounded by the fact that crash site photos were taken.
On January 26, 2020, a helicopter transporting Kobe Bryant, the couple's 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and baseball coach John Altobelli crashed near Malibu as they were heading to a girls basketball game. The pilot was one of the nine people who died in the crash.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the county's fire department, the county as a whole, and eight officers were sued in September 2020, after reports that first responders took and shared photos of the crash site. Chris Chester, whose wife Sarah and daughter Peyton died in the crash, is also suing county workers on the same federal and state claims.
Pelinka said that the morning of the crash, he was in church with his family, receiving messages from Kobe Bryant as he was aboard the helicopter, asking Pelinka if he could help give a young girl a career in sports.
Pelinka told the court that he met Kobe in 1998 at the beginning of his career.
Pelinka told the court that Kobe was his best friend and that he was his sister.
Pelinka said that Bryant cared so much about the beauty she created around her children that she cried through much of the proceedings.
The county attorney said that first responders from various agencies put their lives on the line to respond to the crash and put out the fire.
According to her opening statement, 18 different federal and state agencies responded to the crash scene, including the FBI. The Sheriff's deletion order to staff who took photos helped "contain" the spread of the photos due to "lapses in judgement" from County staff who sent photos to each other.
Bryant wants the county defendants who are accused of taking and sharing crash site photos to pay for their actions. Bryant is suing the county for negligent, emotional distress, and invasion of privacy claims, as well as federal claims which relate to the constitutional right to the images of her dead loved ones, and LA County agency practices that led to the alleged taking and dissemination of photos.
In an early win, Judge John Walter granted Chester and Bryant's attorneys the ability to call a coroner who took photos of the scene, saying that the coroner's photos are the best evidence of what the photos depicted.
The plaintiffs want to inflame the jury's emotions by conflating the coroner's photos, taken for an entirely different purpose, with the photos taken by the Sheriff's and Fire Departments.
Luis Li said in his opening statements that the LACFD staff went "body to body" at the crash site and sent photos to a web of county staff.
"Bryant's family deserves to be treated with the care and dignity that every culture in the world treats those that die," Li said.
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