Rebecca Grossman's husband testified Tuesday that he had ridden in the car with her hundreds of times and never remembered her speeding, despite testimony during her murder trial showing she was traveling 81 mph in a 45 mph zone when two children were killed. hit and killed on a residential street.
Dr. Peter Grossman, director of the Grossman Burn Center, was the first witness to take the stand for the defense, but prosecutors immediately tried to focus their attention on his wife's driving habits.
Rebecca Grossman is accused of driving her high-powered Mercedes SUV on a quiet Westlake Village street, driving behind her then-lover as the two hurried home after drinking cocktails at a nearby restaurant on Sept. 29, 2020. Investigators They say he barely stopped before. She fatally struck Mark and Jacob Iskander, who were at a marked crosswalk.
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 connection with the fatal collision.
Peter Grossman explained that he and his wife were separated at the time of the accident. He testified that the couple had been married for 20 years and cohabited “under the same roof,” but then lived separate lives and dated other people. Rebecca Grossman was romantically involved with former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Scott Erickson in 2020, her husband said from the witness stand.
Lead defense attorney Tony Buzbee has repeatedly told jurors that Erickson is responsible for the Iskander brothers' deaths. It has been suggested that the retired baseball player's powerful black Mercedes accelerated through the intersection first, hitting Jacob and throwing him to the sidewalk and crashing into Mark, whose body was thrown through the air before landing in the path of the retired baseball player's white Mercedes. Grossman.
But prosecution witnesses say that if Grossman hadn't been speeding, he wouldn't have hit the children at all. And a California Highway Patrol officer previously testified that he had ticketed her for driving 92 mph on Highway 101 in Agoura Hills a decade ago.
Deputy. Lawyer Dist. Jamie Castro asked Peter Grossman on Tuesday if he ever remembered his wife speeding while he was a passenger in her car, and the surgeon responded, “I don't remember that.”
“Of the hundreds of times you drove with her, don't you remember her driving over the speed limit?” Castro pressed.
“That's right,” the doctor said.
Castro previously read into the court record, outside the presence of the jury, that Rebecca Grossman received four speeding tickets between 2000 and 2020.
Prosecutors have also alleged that the “black box” (the event data recorder inside Rebecca Grossman's vehicle) tells a different story. The last five seconds of Grossman's travels on the night of the accident were captured. The data shows that she was accelerating at 81 mph and hit the brakes for a second and a half, which slowed her to 73 mph, before a collision activated her airbags.
However, David Notowitz, an audio and video expert who examined three security videos from a home and a boathouse beyond the crosswalk where the children died, said the data shows Grossman's Mercedes was traveling at a significantly lower speed. He said a video examination that captured vehicles passing a short distance from the crosswalk shows Grossman driving 51.9 mph, while the black car in front of her, driven by Erickson, was going 72 mph.
Notowitz said he used the trees in the background to measure speed over distance. In a second video recorded further down the road, beyond the crosswalk, he determined that Grossman was going 52.7 mph, he testified.
Still, Buzbee has repeatedly argued that Rebecca Grossman's vehicle was not the first to hit the children. He told jurors during his opening statements that Erickson lied to authorities the night of the crash when he told them he was driving a 2007 Mercedes pickup truck.
Peter Grossman testified that he had never seen that vehicle outside the second home he shared with his wife when she and Erickson were dating. Instead, the doctor testified that he saw Erickson's 2016 Mercedes 63GL AMG outside the Grossman home in Westlake Village on many occasions. The Grossmans' main home was in Hidden Hills.
Buzbee has argued that sheriff's investigators never checked Erickson's vehicle for damage and said that after the crash, he hid in the bushes near where Rebecca Grossman's disabled vehicle was stopped and watched as investigators detained her.
Peter Grossman testified that after the collision, his wife was overcome with pain and severely bruised. The defense showed images of the socialite's badly bruised arm, the left side of her face and her foot, which she told a friend in a text message was fractured.
“My wife was almost inconsolable: she was crying, she was shaking, she was incredibly emotional” after her release from the Lynwood jail 30 hours after the fatal crash, Grossman said.
