With their caps and gowns, what should have been a celebration this week for the 2026 graduating class in Westlake Village had someone missing, Someone they didn’t forget — their friend Jacob Iskander.
At the graduating ceremony were his friends since kindergarten, his friends from church, his teacher, all holding space for the young boy whose life was cut short by a speeding hit and run driver, in 2020.
It was Jacob’s mom Nancy Iskander who shared the video to social media on Thursday, captioning it, "I have nothing but pain.”
That pain and grief has been front and center of a 6-week-long civil trial against the people responsible for Jacob’s death, and the death of his older brother Mark.
Mark and Jacob had been using a marked crosswalk in Westlake Village in 2020, when they were aged 11 and 8 – when they were fatally struck by a speeding driver, Rebecca Grossman. She was racing another driver at the time, her boyfriend Scott Erickson, after an afternoon spent drinking.
"It's grief and it's the sense of loss that you don't get over, you know, it's a sense of loss you have to face every day, every single day," Nancy Iskander told a Van Nuys Court during the trial.
It’s the second time Iskander has had to relive to a jury the moments after her children were struck, a scene she witnessed and their younger brother Zachary witnessed. A moment she said she replays in her head daily. The moment when their family changed forever.
"The black car went across the intersection first and it came towards me and Zach and then I had to grab Zachary and dive from in front of that car. The bumper was coming towards me and Zach. I still see that bumper now, it's a trauma that I still see it in my nightmares coming towards us," she told the court. "And then the white car passed exactly where Mark and Jacob were and then I looked back after and I didn't find them and I started screaming."
It’s that emotional cost which a jury put a price on, awarding the Iskanders $176 million in damages on Wednesday.
The jury found socialite Grossman and Erickson liable for the deaths, and the penalty also applies to Grossman’s husband Peter who owned the car his wife was driving. Grossman and her boyfriend had been driving at freeway speeds on residential roads, and both left the scene. Jurors found they had acted with conscious disregard for the boys’ safety.
There is a second phase of the trial now underway, determining whether there are punitive damages against the defendants.
"Punish and deter, those are the two things you're going to do," the Iskanders attorney Brian Panish told the jury on Thursday. "Punish, and deter this from happening again."
Grossman is already serving 15-years to life for the murders of Mark and Jacob Iskander.
