Kobe Bryant’s widow, Vanessa, could seek hundreds of millions of dollars in damages in her wrongful death lawsuit against the helicopter company and the estate of the late pilot that was operating the helicopter responsible in the late NBA superstar’s deadly crash on January 26th, according to a report.
It was back in February when Vanessa filed a lawsuit against Island Express Helicopters Inc. and the estate of pilot Ara Zobayan. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of negligence that contributed to the deaths of Bryant, Gianna Bryant, as well as seven others, including a failure to check weather conditions prior to the flight and flying into foggy conditions in which the pilot was not cleared to operate an aircraft.
On that fateful day of January 26th, Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Josh Rubenstein said the department’s Air Support Division grounded all of its helicopters because of foggy conditions and didn’t fly until the afternoon. “The weather situation did not meet our minimum standards for flying,” Rubenstein said. The fog “was enough that we were not flying.”
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department made a similar assessment about the fog and had no helicopters in the air “basically because of the weather,” L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said.
“As a result of Kobe Bryant’s and GB’s deaths, Vanessa Bryant seeks economic damages, non-economic damages, prejudgment interest, punitive damages, and other relief as the Court deems just and proper,” Bryant’s attorneys said in court filings obtained by The Blast.
“Although the total specific amount of personal injury damages that Plaintiff seeks is TBD, Kobe Bryant’s future lost earnings equal hundreds of millions of dollars,” the filing adds.
The Los Angeles County medical examiner-coroner’s office identified blunt-force trauma as the official cause of death for all nine passengers.
At the time of his death, Kobe Bryant’s fortune was estimated at $600 million.
