The family of two young boys who died after being struck in a hit-and-run have been awarded $176 million.
Mark and Jacob Iskader, 11 and eight respectively, were crossing the street with their mother and younger brother when they were hit by a car which then sped off in the Westlake Village area of Los Angeles County on September 29, 2020.
62-year-old Rebecca Grossman was behind the wheel that day, and had allegedly been playing a “a high-speed game of chicken” with her former boyfriend Scott Erikson, an ex-Dodgers baseball player.
Grossman was ultimately sentenced to a 15-year-to-life sentence for the killings of Mark and Jacob. Erikson agreed to film a public information video about careful driving, and so avoided criminal charges.
On Wednesday June 3, 2026, a jury found that both Grossman and Erikson had been negligent and acted with malice when they decided to race one another after allegedly drinking margaritas at a nearby restaurant.
In February 2024, Grossman had been handed 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. The Los Angeles socialite left the scene after hitting the children with her car.
Reacting to the last week’s jury decision and the awarding of $176 million, the Iskander family’s attorney, Brian Panish, revealed that he had asked for his clients to be awarded $375 million.
“Is that a lot of money?” Panish is said to have 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?”
At Grossman’s trial, Mark and Jacob’s mom Nancy had claimed that Grossman and Erikson’s cars were “zig-zagging” between lanes “as if they were playing”. She confirmed that Grossman failed to stop after hitting the boys.
“They didn’t stop before the intersection,” Nancy said. “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.”
Grossman was eventually apprehended by police a third of a mile down the road after the collision.
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