
Villanueva proceeded to tell Bryant of the deaths of her husband and daughter, then said, “Is there anything I can do for you?” “I asked her to leave because I wanted privacy,” Bryant said. And I asked him: What is happening? Why is no one telling me what is happening?”Įventually Sheriff Alex Villanueva walked in to greet Bryant, accompanied by a pastor and another woman, who later identified herself as a publicist. “Then they walked us over to this little closet room area where we waited and waited.

“No one would answer me.”īryant described an ill-prepared and chaotic scene at the sheriff’s station, where she was shuffled to different rooms. “I kept asking if my husband and daughter were OK,” she said. Remembering the Lakers legend a year later.įrom the airport, Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka drove Bryant nearly two hours to the Malibu-Lost Hills station of the L.A. Kobe Bryant, daughter Gianna and seven others perished in a helicopter crash on Jan. Sports Kobe Bryant crash anniversary: Reflecting on his death

That plan was quickly scuttled, with the owner of one of the helicopters telling Bryant, “I can’t fly you. I just felt, I knew that they would be helping people.”īryant recalled rushing then to the airport, where she tried to board a helicopter so she could quickly fly from Orange County to Calabasas, where the helicopter carrying her husband, daughter and seven others had gone down.

I’m sure they’re fine because there’s five survivors,” Bryant recalled telling her daughter. “I told her that Daddy and Gigi were in an accident. 12 deposition in which she was questioned by Miller, the outside attorney for the county.īryant detailed that after the flurry of notifications saying “RIP Kobe,” she went to pick up her daughter Natalia, who had been attending a college entrance exam prep class that morning. “Rather than take accountability for conduct the Sheriff himself has called ‘wildly inappropriate’ and ‘disgusting,’ the County has chosen to pull out all the stops to make the case as painful as possible.”īryant’s lawyers point to her own words during the Oct. “The County’s tactics are simply a cruel attempt to extract a price for victims to obtain accountability,” Bryant’s legal team wrote in a court filing.
