Rebecca Grossman is accused of speeding through a Westlake crosswalk and barely applying the brakes of her white Mercedes SUV before crashing into two small children.
A former NASA scientist said at his murder trial Wednesday that the Hidden Hills woman didn't have time to slam on the brakes before her airbags deployed. Stephen Casner also testified for the defense that it was “hard to imagine” the children not being hit first by a black Mercedes SUV that was preceding Grossman in the crosswalk.
Grossman is accused of driving her Mercedes SUV at high speeds on a quiet Westlake Village street, closely following the Mercedes driven by her then-lover, former Dodgers pitcher Scott Erickson, with whom she had previously had cocktails.
Investigators testified that he was going 73 mph when he fatally struck 11-year-old Mark Iskander and his 8-year-old brother, Jacob, after hitting the brakes a second and a half before the collision deployed their airbags.
Mark, left, and Jacob Iskander.
(Iskander family)
Casner, a human factors expert who retired from NASA and author of the book “Careful,” on the psychology of safety, said studies show that “most people take much longer than 1.5 seconds to brake.” abruptly”.
He downplayed earlier testimony from a prosecution expert about the role of speed in the tragedy. He criticized the data cited and said the testimony “was probably irrelevant.”
Casner was one of several witnesses presented by defense attorneys as they attempted to undermine the prosecution's case against Grossman. She 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 in the fatal collision.
Tony Buzbee, Grossman's lead attorney, has maintained since the beginning of the trial that it was Erickson who hit the two children, causing 11-year-old Mark to step into the path of his client's vehicle.
While cross-examining Casner, Buzbee said there were four key witnesses to the tragedy: the children's mother, Nancy Iskander, who jumped with her five-year-old son out of the path of Erickson's black Mercedes AMG; Susan Manners, who was standing 12 feet away on the edge of the road; and two people, Jake Sands and Yasamin Eftekhari, who witnessed the tragedy from a car.
Iskander testified that he saw Erickson's car go through the crosswalk, rescuing his 5-year-old son from its path, before seeing his older children disappear after Grossman's vehicle passed. Susan Manners said she heard an impact and then saw Mark hit. Sands and Eftekhari described seeing Jacob beaten. Those witnesses have disagreed about which lanes the impacts occurred in.
“Is it possible to arrive at a coherent theory?” Buzbee asked Casner, who reviewed the witnesses' testimony.
“I hear a lot of different scenarios,” Casner responded.
Buzbee then arranged two court chairs to represent the black and white Mercedes SUVs. Portraying himself as Nancy Iskander, he approached the children's location.
“Is there any way the black car didn’t hit the kids?” Buzbee asked.
“It's hard to imagine the car driving by and people just standing there,” Casner responded.
Prosecutor Jamie Castro noted, however, that in an April report that was what Casner said happened. The former NASA scientist acknowledged that he wrote that Erickson's vehicle passed through the crosswalk without hitting anyone before Grossman's vehicle entered it.
Rebecca Grossman's Mercedes SUV is shown after the 2020 accident at the Westlake crosswalk.
(Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department)
Casner said that theory was based on what he knew at the time.
Under questioning by Castro, Casner also admitted that in his book “Beware,” he wrote that even a single alcoholic drink could have immediate effects on a person.
After the fatal crash, Grossman tested at or slightly below California's legal alcohol limit, but investigators and criminalists have testified that she was impaired by a combination of alcohol and Valium. Grossman's defense team attacked that testimony.
A retired Houston detective sergeant, Donald Egdorf, testified for the defense and said the sobriety test conducted at the scene of the collision “was an example of what not to do,” offering a dissection of the errors.
Egdorf, a drug and alcohol recognition expert, said he had conducted thousands of such investigations and that based on the majority of evidence, including videos of her behavior, Grossman was “not intoxicated or disturbed” after the shooting. collision.
The witness also spoke about the overall investigation, saying it would be customary to document the evidence at the crash site with hundreds of photographs and then carefully gather the evidence for preservation. Jurors have already heard that items, including two Mercedes emblems that an investigator said were smashed from the front of Grossman's Mercedes, are missing and are not in evidence.
Jurors also heard from a video expert, David Notowitz, who testified for the defense that, based on video from a home security system, Grossman was going 52.7 mph after his Mercedes had traveled 202 feet from the pedestrian crossing. That testimony appeared designed to undermine prosecution experts who testified that the Mercedes 43 GLE AMG was going 81 mph before Grossman lightly braked before impact.
During cross-examination, Notowitz admitted that he could not tell how fast Grossman was going while in the crosswalk. Buzbee, however, wonders how his client's car can stop so quickly in such a short distance: “We don't have a camera for that, but we do have common sense.”
