New court documents in the lawsuit Vanessa Bryant—the widow of basketball star Kobe Bryant—has filed against the LA County Sheriff’s Department allege that Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s attempts to destroy evidence that deputies had shared grisly crash scene photos had been stymied by the local sheriff’s captain at the time.
In January 2020, a helicopter carrying Kobe along with the Bryants’ daughter, Gianna, six passengers and a pilot crashed into a Calabasas hillside in heavy fog. A few weeks later, allegations arose that first responders had photographed the bodies of crash victims on their personal cell phones and were sharing them.
According to new documents, Vanessa Bryant alleged Villanueva stepped in to halt a “standard inquiry” that was being launched at the station.
“LASD’s internal investigation report reveals that a former captain at the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station ordered a standard inquiry after a civilian submitted a complaint that a deputy had shared graphic photos of Kobe Bryant’s remains at a bar in Norwalk, but Sheriff Villanueva and his staff intervened to stop the standard investigation,” court documents stated.
Rather than launch the standard inquiry, the sheriff was alleged to have told deputies to delete photos to avoid discipline.
“On the sheriff’s orders, deputies were summoned to the Lost Hills station and told that they would not face any discipline if they ‘came clean’ and deleted any photos in their possession,” the court documents stated.
The Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Captain at the time was Matthew Vander Horck—though, notably, the document does not name him and refers only to “the Captain” throughout.
The Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station had seen rapid leadership turnover during that time; Vander Horck had only been leading the station for a few months when the tragic crash happened on Jan. 26, 2020.
“The Captain believed Sheriff Villanueva’s orders were ‘very out of the ordinary’ and immediately became concerned that his staff was receiving instructions outside the chain of command,” a court document stated.
“The Captain halted the order to delete the photos and called his supervisor to express concern that [Villanueva’s] order might constitute an instruction to destroy evidence of a violation of federal law,” the document continued.
During that conversation, the Lost Hills captain allegedly reminded his supervisor that the “last time our deputies got instructions from our executives” of a similar nature, “they were arrested and tried for crimes.” This statement seems to refer to Sheriff Lee Baca’s attempt to conceal abuse in county jails from federal investigators; Baca is now in federal prison for his role in the conspiracy.
The county was forced to turn over a document detailing an internal affairs investigation into the captain’s pushback against Villanueva’s order to Vanessa Bryant’s lawyers, who then brought the captain information to light when they filed a request for more time on the case on Monday, May 10.
“Mrs. Bryant has faced resistance from the county in her efforts to obtain information about photos of her deceased loved ones that were taken and shared by sheriff’s department and fire department personnel for their personal gratification,” Bryant’s lawyers wrote in the document.
The document also revealed that the total number of people who possessed photos of the crash was 18 “and counting.”
Vander Horck soon thereafter left the Lost Hills Station, having been “demoted and relieved of duty” in mid-February 2020, according to reporting from KBUU
News at the time—KBUU cited then-City Manager Reva Feldman as the source for that information. At the time, it was believed he was removed due to the alleged mishandling of a sexual assault that took place in a condo near the Pepperdine campus two weeks after the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant. There was no suggestion in the court documents that the captain’s departure from the station was related to his handling of the crash photo investigation.
After Vander Horck left, Salvador “Chuck” Becerra was installed as the new captain at Lost Hills, resulting in public complaints from Feldman and other leaders in the Malibu/Las Virgenes Council of Governments—the cities served by the Malibu/Lost Hills Station.