NBA legend Kobe Bryant made the list of highest paid dead celebrities nearly a year after his tragic helicopter crash death. The basketball player came in at number six on Forbes’ “Highest-Paid Dead Celebrities of 2020” list. The outlet reported that Bryant raked in an estimated $20million in earnings. Kobe’s 2018 autobiography “The Mamba Mentality: […]
NBA legend Kobe Bryant made the list of highest paid dead celebrities nearly a year after his tragic helicopter crash death.
The basketball player came in at number six on Forbes’ “Highest-Paid Dead Celebrities of 2020” list.
The outlet reported that Bryant raked in an estimated $20million in earnings.
Kobe’s 2018 autobiography “The Mamba Mentality: How I Play” sold more than 300,000 copies this year, which is ten times the amount of the year prior.
Bryant’s jersey was also the second best seller for the NBA – just behind MVP LeBron James’s.
Bryant and his daughter, GiGi, died in January after a helicopter slammed into a hillside outside of Los Angeles.
One of the most popular sports figures in LA and a celebrity around the globe, Bryant was broken beyond recognition when his body was found outside the wreckage of the chopper. His remains had to be identified by his fingerprints.
The report made it clear: Bryant and the passengers almost certainly were dead in an instant due to blunt trauma.
“These injuries are rapidly if not instantly fatal,” wrote Juan Carrillo, senior deputy medical examiner, in Bryant’s report.
The crash that killed the 41-year-old retired Los Angeles Lakers star, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna — clad in the jersey she would have worn to play that morning, with the word “Mamba” on the front and her last name on the back — pilot Ara Zobayan and the others is considered accidental.
Bryant was headed from his Orange County home to his daughter’s tournament at his Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks on the morning of Jan. 26.
The group, including one of his daughter’s coaches, and two of her teammates, encountered thick fog in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.
Zobayan, an experienced pilot who often flew Bryant, climbed sharply and had nearly succeeded breaking through the clouds when the craft took an abrupt left turn and plunged into the grassy, oak studded hills below.
When it struck the ground, it was flying at about 184 mph and descending at a rate of more than 4,000 feet per minute.
The impact caused a crater and scattered debris over an area the size of a football field in the Calabasas hills.
Flames engulfed the wreckage, but burns on the bodies were determined to have occurred after death.
Bryant’s body was found on one side of the wreckage and his daughter was found in a ravine on the opposite side.
