Lawyers for Hidden Hills socialite Rebecca Grossman have consistently maintained that it was her then-lover, former Dodger pitcher Scott Erickson, who first ran over two young children in a Westlake Village crosswalk, a collision fatal case for which she is now accused of murder.
A district attorney investigator, called to testify at Grossman's trial by the defense, filed an additional charge against Erickson on Thursday, alleging that he was “cold-plating,” or using the same license plate on two of the black Mercedes SUVs he owns, one of which he was driving the night the children were killed. The investigator said the practice was a serious crime.
But while Grossman's defense team seized on the license plate issue to portray Erickson as a lawbreaker, the lead prosecutor dismissed the revelation as a years-old red herring.
Grossman, 60, is accused of driving her white Mercedes SUV at speeds reaching 81 mph on Triunfo Canyon Road in the upscale suburban Los Angeles neighborhood, closely following the SUV driven by Erickson.
Prosecutors allege that on September 29, 2020, he went from having cocktails with Erickson at a local restaurant to running after him down the street, where he struck Mark and Jacob Iskander, ages 11 and 8, as they crossed a crosswalk. marked. behind his mother and his 5-year-old brother.
Grossman is charged with two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and one count of hit-and-run resulting in death.
Erickson told authorities he was driving his 2007 Mercedes at the time, and jurors heard him deny on the witness stand that he hit anyone.
Tony Buzbee, Grossman's lead attorney, said Erickson was actually driving his black 2016 Mercedes GL 63 AMG, and that he struck the youths and threw one of them onto the hood of Grossman's white Mercedes GLE 43. An accident reconstruction expert who testified for the defense said Thursday that that's what happened.
Sheriff's officials never inspected Erickson's vehicle, according to testimony.
District Attorney investigator Sergio Lopez testified that his office asked him to take a closer look at Erickson's two Mercedes and obtained license plate captures from the 2007 and 2016 vehicles that showed they had the same Nevada license plate.
“The problem with Mr. Erickson is using the same license for two vehicles,” Lopez said when questioned by Buzbee. The investigator said these fake plates were easily obtained: they could be purchased on Etsy.
Mark, left, and Jacob Iskander.
(Iskander family)
Lopez testified that Erickson was “chilling the registration to avoid paying the registration fee for the 2016 model year.”
Prosecutor Jamie Castro called Lopez's testimony a red herring. Lopez confirmed that Erickson's alleged cold lining had occurred long before the 2020 incident.
“It has nothing to do with the collision?” -Castro asked.
“Correct,” Lopez responded.
Buzbee then jumped up and asked, “Where's Scott Erickson?”
“I have no idea,” Lopez said.
An attorney representing Erickson could not immediately be reached for comment.
On Thursday, jurors also heard from a teenager who was playing tennis in Westlake Village the night of the collision. Dorsa Khoddami reported hearing “alarming” sounds on a nearby road, followed by sudden silence.
“I realized it was a car accident,” Khoddami testified, describing how she and her mother, a doctor, ran from the tennis courts to the crash site.
He said they arrived to find Nancy Iskander, the children's mother, barefoot. The teenager testified that she tried to give the woman some shoes that she had recovered from the street.
“She started screaming, 'Those are my son's shoes!' And I immediately put them back,” said Khoddami, who was 16 at the time. “My mom described it as a war zone.”
Buzbee asked Khoddami if he heard two impacts, which could strengthen the defense's argument that Erickson's vehicle had hit the children first.
Khoddami testified that he had heard a “loud and alarming” sound and then “another sound occurred” and then “everyone paused.”
Authorities found Grossman about three-tenths of a mile from the crosswalk after a fuel shutoff safety system caused his vehicle to stop. She told an officer she responded to, as well as a 911 operator, that she did not know what had happened.
Prosecutors have said Grossman was not as ignorant of the night's events as she claimed, pointing to a text message that a friend testified Grossman had sent her in June 2022, nearly two years after the children's deaths, in the which he said he had seen Nancy Iskander, who was wearing inline skates, fell and turned his head in the woman's direction for a brief second or two.
However, an expert witness reinforced the defense's argument that Grossman was unaware of any impact. William Broadhead, an engineer who specializes in airbags and automobile safety systems, told jurors Thursday that drivers are stunned by the force of an airbag when it deploys.
Defense attorneys wanted to activate an air bag inside the courtroom as a demonstration for jurors, a move that was rejected by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Joseph Brandolino, who said it could be shown on video . The judge said he would allow the controlled release of a seat belt pretensioner, which automatically tightens the belt in a collision, but Sheriff's Department safety monitors rejected that idea.
“It stuns you. … It's confusing if you don't know you're in an accident,” Broadhead said, describing the slamming of the Mercedes' dashboard and the knee airbags and the noise of the belt pretensioner. “You don't know if it's a bomb or a sniper.”
The witness said he did not expect that hitting a pedestrian would cause the bags to inflate. Grossman's airbags deployed defectively, he concluded.
The prosecution and defense argued over the origin of Grossman's bruises, which Broadhead said were the result of an airbag injury.
Prosecutor Castro confronted him with a series of text messages the Hidden Hills woman had sent to a masseuse 10 days before the accident. The messages included photographs and said: “Next time don't massage too hard. You need to relax. I have bruises”.
Buzbee, Grossman's attorney, downplayed the testimony, saying, “We just learned something here: Nicole has strong hands.”
He said the images showed bruises on his client's face, arm and chest that were not there before the night of the collision.
