Inland Valley

A pedestrian was fatally struck near Hemet late Thursday night, Aug. 25 by a vehicle that fled, the California Highway Patrol said.

Car parts left behind prompted the CHP to start a hunt for a gray Honda, said Officer Jason Montez, a spokesman for the CHP San Gorgonio station. The model of Honda wasn’t immediately clear to investigators, he said.

The collision is believed to have happened a few minutes before midnight on Stetson Avenue east of Columbia Avenue, Montez said. No information was available Friday on the pedestrian, including a name and where that person was on the road.

The CHP asks anyone with information about the crime to call 951-769-2000.

A 47-year-old Perris resident died Wednesday night, Aug. 24, when his car rolled over several times after what the California Highway Patrol described as a “road rage” collision on the 15 Freeway in Temecula.

The crash was reported at 8:47 p.m. in the southbound lanes north of Winchester Road.

The dead man, whose name had not been announced as of Thursday afternoon, was not wearing a seat belt and was ejected through his Chevrolet Malibu’s sunroof, said Officer Mike Lassig, a CHP spokesman.

The driver of the other car, a Lexus GS 450h sedan, was not injured, Lassig said. He was not under the influence, Lassig added.

That man, a 38-year-old San Diego resident, told RVCNEWS, a freelance videographer, that he was trying to pass the Malibu but that it cut him off and flashed his brake lights at him. The Lexus driver said the Malibu eventually changed lanes and sideswiped him twice.

Lassig said the preliminary investigation, based on witness statements, “suggests the two drivers engaged each other in a speed contest and took turns sideswiping each other until losing control.”

Both cars spun out, the Malibu striking a guardrail and overturning, Lassig said.

No arrests have been announced. The CHP will work with the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office to determine if any charges should be filed.

Lassig urged drivers not to engage anyone who is exhibiting signs of road rage, even when there is temptation to seek revenge.

“It’s not worth it. Look at the potential. Somebody could die,” he said.

It’s better to pull over to a safe location and call 911, he said.

The CHP asked anyone who witnessed this event to call 951-506-2000.

Rialto planning commissioner and former Fontana Unified school board member BarBara L. Chavez, described by friends as a champion for her city and for children, was killed Sunday, Aug. 21, when her car was struck by an SUV driven by a man who was fleeing an earlier collision, the Fontana Police Department said.

The death of Chavez, 70, left those who had recently seen or spoken with her in disbelief.

The driver of the SUV, Shannon Gene Milligan, 47, was arrested on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, the San Bernardino County jail log shows. Milligan was being held at West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga in lieu of $250,000 bail.

The first crash happened in Rialto, said Sgt. Christian Surgent, a Fontana Police Department spokesman. Details on that crash were not immediately available Tuesday.

Then at 2:47 p.m., Surgent said, Milligan ran a red light at Foothill Boulevard and Maple Avenue, his SUV striking Chavez’s Honda sedan that was headed south on Maple. Milligan suffered a minor injury, Surgent said. His four passengers, ages 16, 18, 20 and 21, were not injured. No one else was in Chavez’s car, Surgent said.

Chavez’s family posted a statement on her Facebook page: “Heaven gained an angel Sunday. Our family lost our queen, mother, grandmother, guerrillera, faithful Catholic daughter, and friend, BarBara L. Chavez. We appreciate everyone’s support and prayers. At this time, we kindly ask for privacy while we mourn the loss of our mom. There is no doubt that our mom will be missed by family and friends. Thank you to all for your support and prayers.”

Chavez was appointed to the Planning Commission in 2018. She served eight years on the Fontana Unified school board, from 2009 to 2016. She was president in 2011, 2012 and 2015. Chavez was defeated in the 2016 election.

Chavez, a teacher’s aide for many years, was also president of the United Steelworkers Local 8599 from 2003 to 2006. That union represents classified, substitutes, child care providers, center monitors and college tutors in Fontana Unified.

“The city is stricken with grief with the news of the loss of our Sister and former USW Local 8599 president,” the current president, Dawn Dooley, wrote in a Facebook post. “On behalf of the entire membership, I send my sincere condolences to the BarBara Chavez family. BarBara helped solidify our school site aides as part of our union before they became classified employees. Rest In Peace Sister.”

Lynn Summers of Rialto had known Chavez for 20 years, working together advocating for students and in union activities. Chavez was the first Latina president of the USW local, Summers said.

Chavez was motivated, Summers said, by “Her love for what the gospel says about love your neighbors, about being peacemakers. She loved the Lord and she loved the community.”

If Chavez heard about a family in need, she would reach out to her many friends and contacts to get help.

“She was very giving. She didn’t care if she didn’t have the best of everything but still she would give like she was a millionaire,” Summers said.

Rafael Trujillo, a Rialto City Council member since 2016, encouraged Chavez to pursue a seat on the Planning Commission. Trujillo had known Chavez since 2004 and said she participated in city activities and had shown an interest in economic development.

“It was natural to ask her to be open to serving on the Planning Commission. She had a big heart for youth but she also had a big heart for her city,” Trujillo said. “Her loss is big on so many levels.”

Much of the coming wave of economic development in the city was vetted by Chavez, Trujillo said.

Chavez taught catechism at St. John Catholic Church in Fontana and was on the ballot for this November’s Fontana school board election, Trujillo said.

“She felt like there were a lot of loose strings that she left untied. She wanted to go back and address those,” he said.

One person died and at least four people, including three children, were transported to a hospital after a rollover crash on the eastbound 91 Freeway in Anaheim on Sunday evening, Aug. 21, authorities said.

The crash occurred at a high rate of speed in the FasTrak lanes just west of Imperial Highway just before 6 p.m., Anaheim Fire & Rescue Battalion Chief Robert Stuart told a freelance videographer at the scene.

The California Highway Patrol was investigating what caused the crash.

Footage from OnSceneTV showed a black pickup truck with major front-end damage and a white Toyota Corolla with heavy damage to the driver’s side.

One person was ejected from the pickup truck and died at the scene, Stuart said.

The fatal victim was identified as Francisco Javier Flores, 32, of Riverside, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

An adult and three minors were in the Corolla, Stuart said. Which vehicle rolled over was not immediately disclosed.

“I don’t know how it sustained the damage, but it was quite extensive and I was very happy to see that they are walking and being treated right now by a doctor,” the battalion chief said of the Corolla.

Officials planned to remain on scene for at least a couple hours to investigate the cause of the crash and motorists traveling eastbound toward Imperial Highway should expect slowdowns, Stuart said.

A 49-year-old man was arrested early Saturday after a suspected DUI crash in Rancho Cucamonga left a bicyclist dead, authorities said.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department named Gerald Willis of Rancho Cucamonga as the suspect who allegedly struck cyclist Daniel Soto, 41, with his black 2019 Jeep Compass around 2 a.m. Saturday. Soto, who was riding in a group including his juvenile son, was on the shoulder of westbound Arrow Route heading toward Haven Avenue when he was hit, according to deputies.

Emergency personnel pronounced Soto, a Riverside resident, dead at the scene.

Willis, who deputies said was under the influence at the time of the crash, was booked on suspicion of gross vehicular manslaughter and held at the West Valley Detention Center.

Investigators urged anyone with information regarding the crash to contact Deputies D. Rusk or M. McDonald at (909) 477-2800.

Anonymous tips can be given at WE-Tip at 1-800-78-27463 or wetip.com

By FRED SHUSTER | City News Service

LOS ANGELES — An emotional Vanessa Bryant, often crying and struggling to maintain her composure, testified Friday that she felt betrayed to learn that first responders had taken personal photos of the helicopter crash that killed her daughter and Laker legend husband, Kobe Bryant, and she lives in fear of the images surfacing.

Bryant, 40, testified that first responders who took photos of her dead 13-year-old daughter Gianna “violated” the girl, and said she was “devastated” to learn that such images were snapped in spite of Sheriff Alex Villanueva assuring her the crash scene would be secured.

She said she continues to suffer from grief and anxiety at the thought of crash site photos surfacing someday. She said her biggest fear is the photos being published “and those photographs constantly being spread.”

“It’s like COVID. Once it’s spread, you can’t get it back,” she said.

Above all, she said, she wanted justice and accountability for her husband and daughter.

Bryant and Irvine financial adviser Chris Chester are suing the suing the county for unspecified millions of dollars over the photos, which they have never seen. Bryant’s 41-year-old husband Kobe and daughter Gianna, Chester’s wife, Sarah, and the couple’s 13-year-old daughter Payton were among the nine people killed in the Jan. 26, 2020, crash.

Their consolidated lawsuits allege negligence and invasion of privacy.

The plaintiffs allege Los Angeles County’s first responders took grisly cell phone pictures of human remains at the remote Calabasas crash site for their own amusement as “souvenirs” and shared them with other law enforcement personnel and members of the public.

The county contends all images taken by its sheriff’s deputies and firefighters were deleted upon orders of their superior officers, no longer exist in any form and never entered the public domain or appeared on the internet.

Bryant and Chester allege mental anguish over the thought that one day in the future, those photos will turn up in public.

“I’m worried about any photographs that might identify my husband and daughter becoming public,” Bryant told jurors from the stand.

On Thursday, Chester testified that when he learned that first responders had taken and shared cell phone pictures from the crash site, his reaction was “disbelief that shifted to anger.”

Chester said he was shocked on Feb. 28, 2020 — his 46th birthday — when news broke that not only were crash scene photos taken by county personnel, they were displayed for others at a bar and at an awards ceremony and texted to others.

“I couldn’t construct a scenario where that would happen,” the even-toned Chester said during questioning by his attorney in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. “I had largely insulated my family from the details (of the injuries suffered by their loved ones). Now, I thought there would be pictures of the remains (on the internet).”

But, as the defense has frequently pointed out during the trial, the photos have not surfaced online in the two and a half years since the tragedy. Multiple county fire and sheriff’s personnel have taken the stand during the federal civil trial and told jurors they deleted whatever accident-site pictures they had on their cell phones. Attorneys for the county have argued that the deletion of photos permanently prevented their public dissemination.

“I’m fearful everyday,” Chester testified. “There’s been a lot of things that people thought didn’t exist — that have turned up on the internet.”

Bryant was the final plaintiffs’ witness to take the stand. The defense began presenting its case Friday morning, calling Sheriff Alex Villanueva as its first witness.

During the trial, the jury has heard from county personnel who have admitted variously taking cell phone pictures at the accident scene, sending them to colleagues, or showing them to friends in law enforcement. In one case, a deputy sheriff expressed great regret that he took his cell phone to a bar in Norwalk and showed accident scene images to a bartender friend.

On Thursday, Chester described for the rapt nine-member jury — which includes a nun — the morning of Jan. 26, 2020, the day of the fatal crash.

Chester said it was an untypical Sunday morning — while his teenage sons were getting ready to play lacrosse, his wife and basketball-playing daughter were planning to catch a ride with Kobe Bryant and Gianna on a helicopter from Orange County to Ventura County, where Payton was to play in a game at the Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks. Kobe had been coaching his daughter and Payton on a team at the academy.

Payton had been on the team for years.

“She loved it,” her father said. “Payton was quite an accomplished little basketball player.”

The last time he saw his daughter, Chester testified, he “gave her a rah-rah speech, kissed Sarah, and said I’ll see them that night.”

Within hours, he began thinking it strange that he hadn’t heard from them since they usually kept in close contact. Then his brother-in-law texted, asking if he knew where Sarah was.

“He said there’d been reports of a crash,” Chester told the jury. “I called Kobe’s assistant, and she let me know that we’d lost communication somewhere between Orange County and Calabasas.”

Chester said he immediately left the lacrosse game with a friend who began driving toward Calabasas. While en route, TMZ reported that Kobe Bryant had been aboard a helicopter that had crashed. He said he called the sheriff’s department, and was told to go directly to the Malibu/Lost Hills sheriff’s station.

“My mind was racing,” he said, adding that as he approached Calabasas he could see smoke rising from the hills.

At the station, it was confirmed there were no survivors. Eventually, Sheriff Alex Villanueva appeared, and Chester said the lawman “understood” that the area had to be “locked down” to keep media and fans away.

There was nothing more Chester could do, so he and his friend who was driving started back home. They stopped at a Calabasas convenience store where “everybody was talking about (the crash) — and people wearing Kobe (hats and jerseys) were heading to the site to get a water bottle or something,” Chester said from the stand.

Chester said he assumed the crash scene would be handled in a “sensitive and professional” fashion. “I didn’t even know (first responders) had cell phones,” he told jurors.

“It never crossed my mind in my wildest imagination that (a first responder) would take pictures up there,” he said.

When he heard the news a month later about the picture-sharing, Chester testified that he immediately told his sons, “Please don’t start Googling for them.”

Attorneys for the plaintiffs contend the images spread to at least 10 others, but there has been no evidence presented that the photos still exist or ever turned up in public.

Along with Chester and Bryant’s loved ones, the crash killed Alyssa Altobelli, 14; Keri Altobelli, 46; John Altobelli, 56; Christina Mauser, 38; and pilot Ara Zobayan, 50.

A retired Los Angeles County fire captain, who allegedly took photographs of human remains at the scene of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and eight others and then sent the images to at least one other employee, testified on Monday, Aug. 15, that he was ordered to take the pictures.

In awkward testimony that ranged from conflicted to hostile, Brian Jordan said he had little memory of the day or of seeing horrific scenes that “are gonna haunt me forever.”

Jordan was called to the stand in the federal civil lawsuit brought by the Laker star’s widow and another family. Vanessa Bryant and Chris Chester are suing the county for negligence and invasion of privacy over the photos.

Bryant’s husband and 13-year-old daughter Gianna, and Chester’s wife, Sarah, and 13-year-old daughter Payton were among the nine people killed in the crash.

Jordan was criticized by the Los Angeles County Fire Department after it determined his photographs from the crash scene had “no legitimate business purpose” and “only served to appeal to baser instincts and desires for what amounted to visual gossip,” according to court records.

Before he could be terminated from his job, Jordan retired, in early 2021, citing his mental health, court papers show. Steven Haney, Jordan’s attorney, wrote in a filing that his client was “simply obeying orders” when he snapped the photos at the scene of the Jan. 26, 2020, crash.

Jordan was clearly troubled when he appeared in the seventh-floor courtroom where the trial has been playing out since Wednesday. He had trouble answering questions and carried on asides with U.S. District Judge John Walter, who at one point advised him to “hang in there” and “do the best you can.”

He said he did not remember whether he used his personal cell phone or a county-issued device to snap photos, what he took pictures of, or even if he had been at the crash scene at all.

When an attorney for Chester described the catastrophic injuries suffered by his client’s wife in an attempt to jar Jordan’s memories, the witness snapped: “Excuse me, I need to take another break,” and quickly walked off of the stand and out of Walter’s courtroom.

When he returned, Jordan told jurors that he was “ordered” by a superior officer to go to the accident site, take photos, “and cover up a particular person,” meaning the remains of Bryant.

“I was there, (but) I do not remember being there,” he told plaintiff’s attorney Jerry Jackson. “So please do not keep describing that scene to me.”

Jordan explained to an attorney for the county that his emotional problems stem from “the injury I suffered from whatever I saw up there (at the crash site).” After a long pause, he added, “My memory is not clear.”

The plaintiffs accuse Los Angeles County’s first responders of taking cellphone pictures of human remains at the remote Calabasas crash site for “souvenirs” and sharing them with other law-enforcement personnel and members of the public.

The county contends all images taken by its sheriff’s deputies and firefighters were quickly destroyed, no longer exist in any form, and never entered the public domain.

Also Monday, Los Angeles County sheriff’s Deputy Joey Cruz testified that on the night of Jan. 28, 2020, he went to the Baja California Bar & Grill in Norwalk and showed his bartender friend crash-site photos containing human remains stored on his personal cell phone.

“Some of my photos had, like, a torso, another one had a leg, another one had a hand,” he told the jury, which includes a nun. “That’s the most I remember about the photos.”

Cruz said that none of the victims could be identified from the photos. However, in a March 30, 2020, videotaped interview conducted with Sheriff’s Department investigators that was played for jurors, the deputy indicted that he could identify Bryant’s body in one of the photos from his “skin tone.”

Jurors at the trial heard on Friday from a sheriff’s deputy who was among the first to arrive at the crash scene and testified that he snapped 25 pictures on his cell phone, a third of which contained close-up images of body parts.

Deputy Doug Johnson said he hiked for more than an hour through remote, brush-filled terrain to get to the site, and taped off the area before snapping photos to “document” the devastation at the request of a deputy at the command post.

Bryant and Chester say they suffer from emotional distress at the possibility of pictures of their family members’ broken bodies one day surfacing on the internet.

Under questioning by a lawyer for Bryant, Johnson testified he texted the 25 photos to the command post deputy and airdropped them to a county fire supervisor.

As for the phone itself, he said he lost it the following year in Las Vegas.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs contend that after Johnson sent the photos, the images spread to at least 10 others, with some displaying them for members of the public.

Two other families with loved ones on the helicopter settled somewhat-similar claims for $1.25 million each. They also accused county first responders of improperly sharing photos of their dead relatives.

 

 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Anne Heche, the Emmy-winning film and television actor whose dramatic Hollywood rise in the 1990s and accomplished career contrasted with personal chapters of turmoil, died of injuries from a fiery car crash. She was 53.

Heche was “peacefully taken off life support,” spokeswoman Holly Baird said in a statement Sunday night.

Heche had been on life support at a Los Angeles burn center after suffering a “severe anoxic brain injury,” caused by a lack of oxygen, when her car crashed into a home Aug. 5, according to a statement released Thursday by a representative on behalf of her family and friends.

She was declared brain-dead Friday, but was kept on life support in case her organs could be donated, an assessment that took nine days. In the U.S., most organ transplants are done after such a determination.

A native of Ohio whose family moved around the country, Heche endured an abusive and tragic childhood, one that helped push her into acting as a way of escaping her own life. She showed enough early promise to be offered professional work in high school and first came to prominence on the NBC soap opera “Another World” from 1987 to 1991, winning a Daytime Emmy Award for the role of twins Marley and Vicky Hudson, who on the show sustained injuries that anticipated Heche’s: Vicky falls into a coma for months after a car crash.

By the late 1990s Heche was one of the hottest actors in Hollywood, a constant on magazine covers and in big-budget films. In 1997 alone, she played opposite Johnny Depp as his wife in “Donnie Brasco” and Tommy Lee Jones in “Volcano” and was part of the ensemble cast in the original “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”

The following year, she starred with Ford in “Six Days, Seven Nights” and appeared with Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix in “Return to Paradise.” She also played one of cinema’s most famous murder victims, Marion Crane of “Psycho,” in Gus Van Sant’s remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic, and co-starred in the indie favorite “Walking and Talking.”

Around the same time, her personal life led to even greater fame, and both personal and professional upheaval. She met Ellen DeGeneres at a the 1997 Vanity Fair Oscar party, in love and began a 3-year relationship that made one of Hollywood’s first openly gay couples. But Heche later said her career was damaged by an industry wary of casting her in leading roles. She would remember advisers opposing her decision to have DeGeneres accompany her to the premiere of “Volcano.”

“We were tapped on the shoulder, put into her limo in the third act and told that we couldn’t have pictures of us taken at the press junket,” Heche said in 2018 on the podcast Irish Goodbye.

After she and DeGeneres parted, Heche had a public breakdown and would speak candidly of her mental health struggles.

Heche’s delicately elfin look belied her strength on screen. When she won the National Board of Review’s 1997 best supporting actress award, the board cited the one-two punch of “Donnie Brasco” and the political satire “Wag the Dog,” in which Heche portrayed a cynical White House aide and held her own against film great Robert De Niro.

Heche also called effectively on her apparent fragility. In 2002 she starred on Broadway in the play “Proof” as a woman fearful of losing her sanity just like her father, a brilliant mathematics professor. An Associated Press review praised her “touching performance, vulnerable yet funny, particularly when Catherine mocks the suspicions about her mental stability.”

In the fall of 2000, soon after her break-up with DeGeneres, Heche was hospitalized after knocking on the door of a stranger in a rural area near Fresno, California. Authorities said she had appeared shaken and disoriented and spoke incoherently to the residents.

In a memoir released the following year, “Call Me Crazy,” Heche talked about her lifelong battles. During a 2001 interview with TV journalist Barbara Walters, Heche recounted in painful detail alleged sexual abuse by her father, Donald Heche, who professed to be devoutly religious and died in 1983 from complications of AIDS. Heche described her suffering as so extreme she developed a separate personality and imagined herself descended from another planet.

In the final days of his life, Heche said, she learned he was secretly gay and that she believed his inability to live honestly fueled his anger and hurtful behavior. Not longer her father died, her brother Nathan — one of her four siblings — was killed in a car crash.

“I’m not crazy. But it’s a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me,” Heche told Walters. In an effort to escape the past, “I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life.”

Heche dated Steve Martin in the 1990s, and is widely believed to have inspired the childlike, but ambitious aspiring actor played by Heather Graham in his Hollywood spoof “Bowfinger.” She later had a son with camera operator Coleman Laffoon, to whom she was married from 2001 to 2009. She had another son during a relationship with actor James Tupper, her co-star on the TV series “Men In Trees.”

Heche worked consistently in smaller films, on Broadway and on TV shows in the past two decades. She recently had recurring roles on the network series “Chicago P.D.” and “All Rise,” and in 2020 was a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars.”

Photos taken at the scene of the fatal helicopter crash that killed NBA legend Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others were shared by a Los Angeles County firefighter during the cocktail hour at an awards ceremony a month after the crash, according to witness testimony.

On Wednesday, the trial was launched for a federal civil lawsuit filed by Bryant’s widow, Vanessa Bryant, which claims that photos from the January 2020 crash were shared by county fire and sheriff’s department employees in settings irrelevant to the investigation, including at a bar.

Former emergency medical technician and wife of a Los Angeles firefighter, Luella Weireter, testified in court on Friday that during the Radio and Television News Association of Southern California’s Golden Mike awards at the Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City in February 2020, she saw LA County firefighter Tony Imbrenda share photos of Bryant’s remains and other images from the crash site with ceremony attendees.

Many firefighters attended the media event, which was also honoring fire department public information officers for their work informing the public about wildfires.

After a small group of people at her table convened to look at images on a cell phone, in what Weireter characterized as being like a party trick, she testified about seeing one firefighter break away from the group, saying, “I can’t believe I just looked at Kobe’s burnt up body and now I’m about to eat.”

After that comment, Vanessa Bryant could be seen in the courtroom with her head in her hands, rocking back and forth, crying.

Weireter is the cousin of Keri Altobelli, who, along with her husband John and daughter Alyssa, also perished in the helicopter crash.

About two weeks after the awards ceremony, Weireter drove to a county fire station in Malibu and filed an official complaint with a battalion chief, she testified. That same day, the LA County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone called her to follow up.

On Thursday afternoon, Vanessa Bryant walked out of court during testimony that described photos taken at the scene of the crash. She became emotional when Victor Gutierrez, a bartender, was asked if he had seen the body of her daughter, Gianna Bryant, in the images. Gutierrez had been describing what he saw in the photos shown by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy at a bar on a prior date.

https://www.dailynews.com/2021/11/16/sheriff-villanueva-says-he-encouraged-destruction-of-kobe-bryant-crash-scene-photos/Bryant cried, stood up and her attorney asked the presiding judge permission for Bryant to leave the courtroom.

Bryant did not return for the remainder of Gutierrez’s testimony, which continued with a series of surveillance clips from the bar he was working at on January 28, 2020 — two days after the crash and a month before the awards ceremony. Gutierrez described wincing at the photos and then admitted to telling the condition of the victims’ bodies to five sets of people.

The trial is expected to last about two weeks and witnesses will likely include Vanessa Bryant and LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva. The suit, which was filed in September 2020, seeks undisclosed damages and claims civil rights violations, negligence, emotional distress and violation of privacy.

A jury of six women and four men was selected for the case. They include a nun, someone who works in TV production for NBC Universal, a college student, a real estate investor, a pharmaceutical researcher, a computer science professor and a restaurant host.