By TERRI VERMEULEN KEITH
VAN NUYS — Jurors deliberated for a second day Friday in the murder trial of Grossman Burn Foundation co-founder Rebecca Grossman, who is charged in a 2020 crash in Westlake Village that left two young brothers dead — and the prosecution asked the judge to take the defendant into custody for allegedly attempting “to influence the jury.”
The nine-man, three-woman panel spent just under an hour listening again to portions of the testimony of four prosecution witnesses, including the victims’ mother, two eyewitnesses and a former friend of ex-Dodgers pitcher Scott Erickson, who was driving a black Mercedes-Benz SUV which the defense contends struck 11-year-old Mark Iskander and his 8-year-old brother, Jacob, first.
Grossman, 60, is charged with two counts each of murder and vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and one felony count of hit-and-run driving resulting in death in connection with the Sept. 29, 2020, crash.
At a hearing outside the jury’s presence Friday, Deputy District Attorney Ryan Gould asked Superior Court Judge Joseph Brandolino to order Grossman to be taken into custody. The prosecutor said videos that were not allowed by the judge to be used in the trial were sent Thursday to a reporter after Grossman asked for a business card, saying that is a direct violation of the court’s protective order and that it can only be interpreted as an “attempt to influence the jury.”
A bodycam video that had also been excluded from the trial also wound up on a Facebook page to which Grossman’s daughter belongs, according to the prosecutor.
One of Grossman’s attorneys, John Hobson, told the judge that it was the first he had heard about the alleged leaks of the videos, and said that it didn’t mean that the email sent to the reporter came from Grossman.
The judge — who noted that jurors had been admonished not to go on the Internet or view media reports about the case — declined to immediately…
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