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LOS ANGELES (CN) — A Los Angeles County jury on Wednesday awarded $176 million to the family of two brothers who were killed in a hit-and-run crash in 2020 by Rebecca Grossman, the wife of a renowned plastic surgeon, as they were crossing the street with their mother.
After two days of deliberations, the jury found Grossman and former professional baseball player Scott Erickson, her lover at the time, were negligent in death of the two boys.
They also found that the two had acted with malice, which means that the trial will resume tomorrow to decide on punitive damages.
“We have more work to do, and we’ll do our talking tomorrow,” Brian Panish, an attorney for the Iskander family, said after verdict, referring to the punitive damages stage of the trial.
Grossman, 62, is serving a 15-year-to-life sentence in state prison after she was convicted in 2024 of two felony counts of murder, two felony counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and one felony count of hit-and-run driving resulting in death. A California Court of Appeal in March upheld her conviction.
Mark and Jacob Iskander, ages 11 and 8, were killed on the evening of Sept. 29, 2020, as they were crossing the road at a crosswalk in a residential neighborhood of Westlake Village, an affluent city in western LA County. They were out with their parents and their two younger siblings.
Grossman and Scott Erickson, a former pitcher for the Minnesota Twins and other Major League Baseball teams, are accused of racing each other that evening in separate Mercedes SUVs after they had been drinking margaritas at a Westlake Village restaurant.
The boys’ mother, Nancy Iskander, testified at Grossman’s murder trial that the two vehicles were approaching the crosswalk at crazy speeds and changing lanes as if they were playing. She was able to grab one of the younger siblings and jump out of the way of Erickson’s black SUV, but Grossman’s white SUV slammed into Mark and Jacob.
Grossman didn’t stop after she hit the boys, even though the airbags of her SUV had engaged, and her vehicle only halted by itself one-third of a mile from the crosswalk.
Erickson, 58, avoided criminal charges by agreeing to film a public service announcement about safe driving.
Panish asked the 12 jurors on Monday to award some $375 million to his clients.
“Is that a lot of money?” Panish asked. “Yeah. But it’s a tremendous loss. … What could be worse for a parent than to see your kids run down by a drunk driver?”
Erickson, during his trial testimony, denied any responsibility for the deaths of Mark and Jacob, denied racing Grossman and denied going over 50 miles per hour. He was forced to admit he lied to police about which car he had been driving — he owned two black Mercedes SUVs but was in the habit of swapping one license plate between them.
“My client made some stupid, stupid decisions related to this case,” his attorney Jeff Braun told the jury. “My client lied to the police. He lied to his lawyers in this case. And that’s a hard, hard hole to dig out of.” But he emphasized Erickson did not hit the two boys and argued that there was little evidence to prove that he had been racing.
Grossman’s attorney, Esther Holm, tried to blame the crash on the city of Westlake Village for maintaining what she said was a dangerous crosswalk.
The jury rejected that argument in their verdict.
“The city knew about this dangerous condition for years,” she said. “People were having incidents, near misses.”
Grossman’s husband, Dr. Peter Grossman, is the medical director of the Grossman Burn Center and the founder of Grossman Plastic Surgery in West Hills, California.
Attorneys for Grossman and Erickson declined to comment on the verdict.
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