Kobe Bryant and others Dead in Helicopter crash
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Have you ever worked as hard at anything as Kobe Bryant did/does at basketball?
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Vanessa Bryant, families of other crash victims agree to settle lawsuit vs. pilot's estate, helicopter company
9:47 PM ET
Vanessa Bryant, her children and relatives of the additional victims filed a settlement agreement notice Tuesday with a federal judge here but terms of the confidential deal weren't disclosed.
If approved by the court, the settlement would end a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit filed against the estate of the pilot and the owner and operator of the helicopter that crashed into a hillside on Jan. 26, 2020.
Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter and six other passengers were flying from Orange County to a youth basketball tournament at his Mamba Sports Academy in Ventura County. The helicopter encountered thick fog in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.
The others killed were Orange Coast College baseball coach John Altobelli, his wife Keri and their daughter Alyssa; Christina Mauser, who helped Bryant coach his daughter's basketball team; and Sarah Chester and her daughter Payton. Alyssa and Payton were Gianna's teammates.
The National Transportation Safety Board released a report in February that blamed pilot error for the crash. The NTSB said a series of poor decisions led Zobayan to fly blindly into a wall of clouds where he became so disoriented he thought he was climbing when the craft was plunging.
The agency also faulted Island Express Helicopters Inc. for inadequate review and oversight of safety matters.
The settlement agreement would end legal action against Zobayan's estate, Island Express Helicopters Inc. and its owner, Island Express Holding Corp. The suit alleged the companies didn't properly train or supervise Zobayan and that the pilot was careless and negligent to fly in fog and should have aborted the flight.
Island Express Helicopters has denied responsibility and said the crash was "an act of God" it couldn't control. It countersued two Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controllers, saying the crash was caused by their "series of erroneous acts and/or omissions."
The settlement agreement wouldn't include the countersuit against the federal government.
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9:47 PM ET
Vanessa Bryant, her children and relatives of the additional victims filed a settlement agreement notice Tuesday with a federal judge here but terms of the confidential deal weren't disclosed.
If approved by the court, the settlement would end a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit filed against the estate of the pilot and the owner and operator of the helicopter that crashed into a hillside on Jan. 26, 2020.
Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter and six other passengers were flying from Orange County to a youth basketball tournament at his Mamba Sports Academy in Ventura County. The helicopter encountered thick fog in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.
The others killed were Orange Coast College baseball coach John Altobelli, his wife Keri and their daughter Alyssa; Christina Mauser, who helped Bryant coach his daughter's basketball team; and Sarah Chester and her daughter Payton. Alyssa and Payton were Gianna's teammates.
The National Transportation Safety Board released a report in February that blamed pilot error for the crash. The NTSB said a series of poor decisions led Zobayan to fly blindly into a wall of clouds where he became so disoriented he thought he was climbing when the craft was plunging.
The agency also faulted Island Express Helicopters Inc. for inadequate review and oversight of safety matters.
The settlement agreement would end legal action against Zobayan's estate, Island Express Helicopters Inc. and its owner, Island Express Holding Corp. The suit alleged the companies didn't properly train or supervise Zobayan and that the pilot was careless and negligent to fly in fog and should have aborted the flight.
Island Express Helicopters has denied responsibility and said the crash was "an act of God" it couldn't control. It countersued two Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controllers, saying the crash was caused by their "series of erroneous acts and/or omissions."
The settlement agreement wouldn't include the countersuit against the federal government.
Vanessa Bryant to settle suit over helicopter crash
Vanessa Bryant and families of other victims in the January 2020 helicopter crash that killed NBA star Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others have agreed to settle a lawsuit against the pilot and owners of the helicopter.
From the archives: What if the Nets had drafted Kobe?
Just suppose the New Jersey Nets had drafted Kobe Bryant instead of Kerry Kittles in 1996? Here's what could have happened.
Kobe and Gigi, Forever Courtside
Inside the Nets game that produced a father-daughter moment seen round the internet.
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Kobe and Gigi, Forever Courtside
Inside the Nets game that produced a father-daughter moment seen round the internet.
By Matt Sullivan
Photo: Paul Bereswill/Getty Images
Kobe Bryant blew up my phone once. He didn’t have my number, although he was known to cold-call writers like that. He’d text basketball players, too, with the same one-liners for superstars and teens alike. But in this particular case, my iPhone actually malfunctioned, the result of a real-estate broker in San Antonio responding to my tweet about a story we ran at Bleacher Report’s magazine in 2018, which prompted Kobe to go at the guy. Good-bye, my mentions; hello, Genius Bar.
In my two-year journey off the court with NBA players, no presence proved more influential than Kobe. More than Michael Jordan. (Except maybe the sneakers.) More than LeBron. (Except for his politics.) He was a mentor to the Brooklyn Nets’ snake charmer Kyrie Irving, who would call the so-called Black Mamba on the verge of championships, fatherhood, movie deals, anything, anytime. “I saw what he was creating,” Kyrie explained to me, “and I knew that I wanted the same structure: He had his own company, he had his own belief system, he had his own principles that he lived by. He didn’t give a fuck what anyone said.”
I left an email to the Black Mamba in my Drafts folder on Sunday, January 26, 2020 — the kind you wait until Monday to send in hopes of a quicker response. What happened that morning, and that year, was sudden, and scary, and sad. But Kobe’s legacy will be in the joy of its everywhere effect. And he swooshes all throughout my book, Can’t Knock the Hustle: Inside the Season of Protest, Pandemic, and Progress with the Brooklyn Nets’ Superstars of Tomorrow. It opens with Kyrie aboard Kobe’s helicopter, seeking career advice — on the condition that the student guest-coach for the professor’s team, which starred 13-year-old Gigi Bryant. It ends at Kobe’s gym in California, where I’d gotten a look inside the room for an all-star seminar and where, on Election Day, a secret pickup game between Kyrie, Kevin Durant, and James Harden helped a dynasty grow in Brooklyn.
The final public appearance described below, before the crash, is how we’ll remember The Mamba and the girl-dad all the same: underground with no-name Nets and teenagers from Kyrie’s high school, courtside with Brooklyn’s almost-all-star Spencer Dinwiddie, and in a loving moment shared across our feeds. RIP, Kobe and Gigi.
EXCERPT FROM 'CAN’T KNOCK THE HUSTLE'
Kobe hated going to NBA games. Too much attention. Too many people. Too many selfies. “To make the trip,” he said, “that means I’m missing an opportunity to spend another night with my kids, when I know how fast it goes.” He was 41, and he’d hardly watched pro basketball in the two and a half seasons since he’d retired — until Gigi, the second oldest of his four daughters, became a legitimate pro prospect herself, at 13 years old. Now they were watching NBA League Pass together every night. Those Batphone text messages to rookies, the pro camp back at The Sports Academy in August, all that elder shit — Kobe didn’t necessarily do all that, except when he was doing it for his guys Kyrie Irving and Kawhi Leonard and maybe Russ Westbrook, because he wanted to. He did that because the legends who’d come before him had passed down heirlooms for safekeeping: the blue-chip investments, the public deference of the talented, the all-timer’s tricks of dirty play. That was a call of duty. But this, with Gigi, this was love and basketball. This was seeing sport through her eyes.
So they went to a game at Staples Center before Thanksgiving — Kobe’s first time back since they retired both of his jerseys, 8 and 24, a couple seasons earlier — because the Lakers were playing the Hawks, and Gigi loved Atlanta’s deep-range shooter Trae Young, the way he could chuck threes with the flair of Steph Curry, at 21 years old. She and Trae even shared their trainer with Kyrie. And tonight, the Nets were playing Atlanta, in Brooklyn. C’mon, Dad!
“All right, fuck it,” Kobe told the trainer. “Let’s just go to another fucking NBA game. Gigi wants to go.”
He talked his wife out of some extra Christmas plans in the city and watched Gigi hoop at the office of the players’ union in Midtown with another top girls’ basketball phenom. By late afternoon, Kobe and Gigi were working out again, in the private underground practice gym at Barclays Center. On their way upstairs to the game, the Bryants greeted some of the Nets’ developmental projects heading in for extra work. The players marveled at, though were not in the least shocked by, Kobe grinding through drills in a pinstripe designer tracksuit and low-tops.
Fifteen minutes before tip-off, Spencer Dinwiddie spotted Kobe courtside. They’d talked and texted a few times, but hadn’t been able to schedule a workout together. All of a sudden, Spencer thought, this was The Mamba in person, man! Finally! Spencer had a damn poster of Kobe on his wall growing up, and to that day he had an autographed No. 24 jersey in his room.
“You’re playing like an All-Star,” Kobe told him. “Keep it up.”
“Shit, man, I’m tryin’,” Spencer said.
“Nah, you ain’t tryin’ it. You doin’ it.”
Kobe and Gigi settled down next to Clara Wu Tsai and her son in the owners’ seats next to the Brooklyn bench. Kenny Atkinson was coaching so hard that he didn’t notice Kobe directly behind him. Spencer noticed: He was never shook by opposing fans or by guarding LeBron, but Kobe’s presence made Spencer, not two minutes into the first quarter, straight-up clank a twenty-five-footer off the backboard.
The Barclays Center crowd had been pretty dead that Saturday evening, until they put The Mamba on the big screen. Kyrie geeked out, stretching his achy shoulder out of his corduroy blazer and craning his neck for a look at highlights from what became known as the “Mamba Out” game, when Kobe dropped sixty on Utah in his career finale. The Barclays cameraman stepped closer toward Seats No. 7 and 8, and the scoreboard operator beamed Kobe and his daughter up into the Jumbotron. Kobe offered the tacit selfie grin of a purist who’d rather be in an empty gym, but Gigi smiled, her cheeks so wide they made her eyes close. The crowd smiled a little wider, too.
There was another burst of cheer in the second quarter, when Kobe stood up to greet Vince Carter. At 42, his contemporary — no longer living the dunktacular legend of Vinsanity from his heyday on the Nets and Raptors — was on a final season’s lap around the league with the Hawks, and the OGs locked fists.
“How you holdin’ up in retirement?” Vince laughed.
“I’m happier than I’ve ever been, man,” Kobe said. “Happier than ever.”
In the third quarter, with the Nets down thirteen to the worst team in the conference, Atkinson got called for a technical foul. He and Kobe, who was rooting for the Nets, had been shocked by the referees all game long. Expletives had been used. But during this break in the action, a camera scanning courtside spotted Kobe, pleasantly inhabited by an almost unfamous happiness, teaching his daughter about the game. Kobe loved the rhythmic nature of this sport, how sometimes you could hear the ball before you saw it. After he tore his Achilles tendon in 2013, he would listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and marvel at how the maestro had composed it while legally deaf — and then, because he was Kobe Bryant, he learned how to play the piano by ear. Watching the silent cutaway at Barclays, as the girl-dad leaned in and conducted his hands toward the court, nobody could quite tell what Kobe was explaining to Gigi. The clip was only nine seconds long, but pretending to read this maestro’s lips became the rare unmean internet meme, a blank caption in which any fan could imagine the lesson of their dreams. Within two weeks, the father-daughter moment would be watched more than 68 million times from one tweet alone.
But Kobe wasn’t thinking about his virality. At the final buzzer, he stood up onto the court, in his blue beanie and scarf, and bear-hugged Trae Young, who reminded Kobe what a fan he was — what a fan he was of his daughter — then dapped-up Vince Carter again, too. “Let’s talk more before end of season,” Kobe offered the OG, “but let’s continue to teach our daughters. We’ll talk more.”
In the postgame courtside congregation, Kyrie waited his turn; he’d had plenty of time with the professor. Besides, Kobe wanted to speak with Kyrie and Spencer, together. Spencer was sweaty — he’d relaxed enough in front of his idol to score thirty-nine points and keep the Nets in playoff position, after dropping forty-one the game before that — and he was satisfied.
“Man, you know why you didn’t get forty?” Kobe asked. “ ’Cuz you were thinkin’ about forty. You gotta go out there and think about sixty. And then you just fall right into fifty. ’Cuz you coulda easily had fifty tonight.”
The three of them shared a good, strong laugh, and Spencer hugged the poster on his wall. “You’re an All-Star in my book,” Kobe reiterated. Kyrie said he would catch Kobe later and pranced back to the locker room with his arm around his teammate. “There we go,” Spencer said, smiling at him as he turned back for one last glance at the legend. “There! We! Go!”
Kobe and Gigi were ready to pull out of the VIP garage at Barclays Center when a New Jersey boys’ high-school basketball team shouted: “Yo! It’s St. Pat’s!” Kobe stepped out of the Suburban and turned back around. He knew Kyrie’s alma mater. He used to play against them in his Philly days and talk trash in Italian.
Kyrie had helped to reopen St. Pat’s — as The Patrick School — and taken one player in particular under his wing. But Kobe immediately recognized the junior forward Jonathan Kuminga as one of the top prospects in the nation. Jon, who’d moved from the Democratic Republic of Congo to West Virginia at 13, to Long Island and The Patrick School in Jersey over the past year, knew he was good, but Kyrie had taught him to stay humble.
Kobe and Jon shook hands and stood in the middle of a team photo, inside of which two selfies were being taken. Kobe, of course, was more interested in a matchup that the Patrick School boys were hyping: their rivalry game against Roselle Catholic, which was going down here at Barclays — at Kyrie’s own tournament — in less than forty-eight hours.
“What’s your game plan?” Kobe asked the team.
All the kids answered all over one another.
“Feel good about it?”
“Yeah!”
“Then go out and do it.”
Kobe’s car drove out of the garage, the boys loaded onto their bus, and Kyrie emerged from the locker room toward his bulletproof Escalade. He had not expected to see his guests, happy to pay their way and receive no thanks whatsoever.
“Y’all good?” Kyrie asked the boys.
“Uh, yeah, we met Kobe!”
He had missed his mentor by seconds — one limo-size elevator door had closed as another was opening — but Kyrie was more interested in the game plan, too.
“You guys are good? Cool. OK, now what we doing against Roselle?”
After midnight, Jon Kuminga direct-messaged Kobe on Instagram.
Appreciate it today for the pic big bro it means a lot to me and my teammates
Kobe wrote back: My man!! Go get em!!!
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Vanessa Bryant Asked to Undergo Psychiatric Exam Over Crash Photos
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LA County wants Vanessa Bryant to get a psych exam before her lawsuit goes to trial
Vanessa Bryant, pictured in a 2010 photo, and others sued over photos from the 2020 helicopter crash that killed her husband, NBA legend Kobe Bryant, and others.
Alex Brandon/AP
Los Angeles County is demanding that a judge force Vanessa Bryant and others to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before a lawsuit they filed against county officials goes to trial.
NBA legend Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others were killed in a helicopter crash in California in January 2020. Reports later emerged that photos of the crash scene were being shared online. Those photos were allegedly taken by first responders.
The lawsuit is over those alleged leaked images of the crash that were reportedly shared by emergency responders.
Families of the crash victims filed the lawsuit in September 2020 and are requesting undisclosed damages. Among their claims are violations of their civil rights and privacy and emotional distress.
In a motion filed in federal court on Friday, attorneys for LA County say Vanessa Bryant and other plaintiffs should be compelled to undergo an independent psychiatric examination. The core of their argument surrounds the families' claims that they are suffering from "severe emotional distress," court documents reviewed by NPR say.
Attorneys for the county said compelling the plaintiffs to undergo a doctor's evaluation is necessary "to evaluate the existence, extent and nature of Plaintiffs' alleged emotional injuries."
"A central tenet of the County's defense is that Plaintiffs' severe emotional and mental injuries were not caused by any conduct of Defendants, but rather by the tragic helicopter crash and resulting deaths of their loved ones," the county's attorney went on to say. "Plaintiffs cannot be suffering distress from accident site photos that they have never seen and that were never publicly disseminated."
Attorneys for the families are arguing against the involuntary tests and want to find a way that evaluates their emotional distress by methods that are "less intrusive."
The next court hearing over this request is scheduled for Nov. 5. The trial over the lawsuit is expected to begin in February.
Vanessa Bryant, pictured in a 2010 photo, and others sued over photos from the 2020 helicopter crash that killed her husband, NBA legend Kobe Bryant, and others.
Alex Brandon/AP
Los Angeles County is demanding that a judge force Vanessa Bryant and others to undergo a psychiatric evaluation before a lawsuit they filed against county officials goes to trial.
NBA legend Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others were killed in a helicopter crash in California in January 2020. Reports later emerged that photos of the crash scene were being shared online. Those photos were allegedly taken by first responders.
The lawsuit is over those alleged leaked images of the crash that were reportedly shared by emergency responders.
Families of the crash victims filed the lawsuit in September 2020 and are requesting undisclosed damages. Among their claims are violations of their civil rights and privacy and emotional distress.
In a motion filed in federal court on Friday, attorneys for LA County say Vanessa Bryant and other plaintiffs should be compelled to undergo an independent psychiatric examination. The core of their argument surrounds the families' claims that they are suffering from "severe emotional distress," court documents reviewed by NPR say.
Attorneys for the county said compelling the plaintiffs to undergo a doctor's evaluation is necessary "to evaluate the existence, extent and nature of Plaintiffs' alleged emotional injuries."
"A central tenet of the County's defense is that Plaintiffs' severe emotional and mental injuries were not caused by any conduct of Defendants, but rather by the tragic helicopter crash and resulting deaths of their loved ones," the county's attorney went on to say. "Plaintiffs cannot be suffering distress from accident site photos that they have never seen and that were never publicly disseminated."
Attorneys for the families are arguing against the involuntary tests and want to find a way that evaluates their emotional distress by methods that are "less intrusive."
The next court hearing over this request is scheduled for Nov. 5. The trial over the lawsuit is expected to begin in February.
This. The fuck are they thinking? I’d get a lawyer to go “a time to kill” on their asses. Why don’t they think she’s mentally disturbed by what happened?
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