The relatives of two young boys who died after being hit by a Los Angeles socialite have been awarded $176 million, and their lawyer has described the incident as a tragedy that never needed to happen.
Mark Iskander, 11, and his brother Jacob, eight, were crossing the street with their mother and their younger brother Zachary when they were struck and left fatally injured.
The brothers were killed in Westlake Village on September 29, 2020. Prosecutors said Rebecca Grossman, 62, and her former partner, ex-Dodgers player Scott Erikson, were engaged in what was described as a ‘a high-speed game of chicken’ at the time.
Grossman has since received a 15-year-to-life prison sentence for the murders of Mark and Jacob. Erikson avoided criminal charges after agreeing to record a safe-driving video.
In February 2024, at a court in Van Nuys, Grossman was convicted on 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. Investigators said she struck the children and then drove away.
On Wednesday, June 3, a jury concluded the pair were negligent and acted with malice, finding they had raced one another after allegedly having margaritas at a nearby restaurant.
Following the decision, the Iskander family’s attorney, Brian Panish, shared an especially painful point about what the family has lost.
Panish had sought $375 million in damages. While that figure may seem enormous, he argued no sum could truly balance what was taken from the family.
“Is that a lot of money?” The Independent reported he asked the jury. “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?”
Los Angeles civil litigator Neama Rahmani told The Los Angeles Times there were clear reasons the outcome landed the way it did.
He said the case ‘had everything you need for a nuclear verdict’, pointing to the children’s deaths, ‘a parent and child who witnessed their deaths’, and the allegations of impaired driving and playing ‘chicken’ on public roads.
“This was a big win for the plaintiffs,” he added.
In Grossman’s criminal trial two years earlier, the boys’ mother, Nancy, testified that Grossman had been ‘zig-zagging’ across lanes alongside Erickson, ‘as if they were playing’, and that the vehicle did not stop after hitting the children.
Law enforcement later stopped Grossman about a third of a mile from the crash site.
“They didn’t stop before the intersection,” Nancy had said, per Oxygen. “They didn’t stop at the intersection. They didn’t stop when an 11-year-old was on the hood of the car… Nobody stopped.”