A bizarre letter shows how LA socialite Rebecca Grossman pleaded for forgiveness with the parents of two boys she killed in a hit-and-run in the fall of 2020.
During the trial, the court heard how the socialite had been having drinks with her lover, former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Scott Erickson, before the pair engaged in a street race, driving at high speed through an intersection in the residential neighbourhood of Westlake Village, north west of LA.
The two youngsters were killed when she struck them with her Mercedes-Benz SUV as they walked in the marked crosswalk with their mother Nancy Iskander and 5-year-old brother Zachary. Mark died at the scene of the incident, while his younger brother Jacob died later at a local hospital.
In a letter, obtained by the Daily Mail, Grossman pleaded with the parents of the two boys for forgiveness, writing that she would have driven her car “into a tree” if she’d had the chance.
“Dear Nancy and Karim, I’ve not had the opportunity to write you since I was incarcerated,” Grossman wrote to the Iskanders.
“First I want to express my profound sadness that I feel daily and that there’s not a day that passes that I don’t think about you and pray that you and your children are surrounded by guardian angels, and that of course includes your forever angels Mark and Jacob,” Grossman added.
She goes on to state she hopes the boys are watching over her to “protect [her] from any more pain” while shielding her “family from harm for each of [their] remaining days on earth.”
The letter adds that she “desperately” wanted to reach out to the couple, but was stopped “time and time again” by people presiding over the case. “I have been and will always be so very sorry,” she continues.
Grossman later goes on to claim that she would have driven her car into a tree if she had the chance, before embarking on a sob story about her childhood and life.
“As God is my witness, if I had seen anyone in the road ahead of my car, my knee-jerk reaction would have been to immediately steer away hard, to avoid hitting anyone or anything,” she wrote.
“I wish that I had seen something, even a glimpse - any sign of anything. I have re-lived that split second in time over and over in my head a billion times.
“I give you my word that if I had been given the opportunity, I would have driven my car into a tree.
“I wish God had given me the opportunity to give my life instead of that of Mark and Jacob’s. I’m not afraid of death, I know that our souls live eternally,” the letter adds.
Grossman then makes the strange revelation that she’d reached out to NASA to see if they had video recordings of what happened that night.
“I wished I had a dash cam on my car that night. I told my husband and children that at the same time my airbags deployed, I thought something came down on top of my car,” she said. πI even reached out to people at satellite companies like NASA and Space X in hope that maybe there was a video that captured what happened.”
Grossman later goes into detail about the days after the incident.
“At first, It was difficult to function at all. I could not remember what people had said to me minutes earlier,” she wrote.
She then remarks how her elderly mother “died within a year of the tragedy”, after five years of suffering from Alzheimer’s - after which she “could not get up off my hand and knees from sobbing uncontrollably for months on end.”
“I couldn’t believe how many tears could come out of my body,” she gripes. “I so desperately wanted to reach out to you.”
Conceding her pain “was only a fraction of what both [parents] were feeling,” she goes on to claim she was suicidal, recalling that a news broadcast she saw from the hospital was when [she] first learned that the children had died.
“I started hyperventilating. I could not breathe. I could not stand. I no longer wanted to live on,” she wrote.
Throughout her trial, prosecutors argued that Grossman did not deserve any remorse as she has proven to be a narcissist, arguing for the maximum punishment for the fatal hit-and-run.
But Grossman’s lead attorney repeatedly blamed Scott Erickson, a retired MLB pitcher, for the deaths, suggesting his car hit the boys first as the pair - reunited after Grossman briefly separated from her husband - sped down the street.
However, the jury didn’t buy it - and a judge four days ago threw out Grossman’s bid to have her murder convictions overturned.
Grossman is yet to be sentenced, but prosecutors have asked that she serve two consecutive 15-years-to-life terms, plus an extra four years for fleeing the scene.
