Crash Photos Create Family Rage!

PLEASE NOTE: The following writing (in italics) is a work of fiction (by me) of actual events that took place on a California Highway on October 31st, 2006. It is not supposed to put words, actions or emotions into the mouths of the REAL people involved in this tragedy. Also some facts may have been changed in this story or may be wrong. My purpose for presenting it this way is to get you to focus on the feelings of the family members during one of the worst nights of a parents life.

"Imagine you are sitting at home on Halloween. You have your candy all ready for the hordes of young children wishing to get their sugary fix. After a few children stop by your house you get a phone call. It's the police. You are told there has been an accident and that you need to come to the scene. It involves your Porsche 911 and your 18 year-old daughter. She's hurt, but the cops won't disclose anymore details. Frantic you grab your wife and tell your other kids to stay put. You put on some presentable clothing and rush to the scene of the accident with your wife in the passenger seat.

Arriving at the accident you see your crashed car. Immediately you know that nobody could have survived the crash. You hope it was a car thief - and not your daughter - who stole the vehicle from your watchful eye. Your daughter knew she wasn't supposed to drive your car.

Upon entering the taped off area you are met by police, investigators, detectives and EMS. They tell you that you daughter was killed in the crash. According to them she didn't feel any pain! The worn you about the crash scene and what you are about to see. You just want to see you daughter. You just want to hold her - even though it is just her body. The next few moments of your life will forever live in your head. When you close your eyes at night you will see the horror of what happened.

You won't be able to hold her dying or dead body in your arms. She is still stuck in the wreckage. You're warned one last time that the crash was extensive and that the top of the vehicle was torn wide open. You don't care what they say, you have to see. You have to witness the scene in order to know beyond a doubt that your beautiful daughter which you affectionately called Angel is no longer alive.

All around you, you hear people talking about how this is one of the worst crash scenes they have ever encountered. You don't care about that. You just want to see her for one last time. The CSI are taking pictures of the scene. You see flash bulbs in the distance as the jaws of life start to be unfolded from the truck it is carried on.

You make your way to your car. To your daughter. What you see is excruciating. The details pop into your head and you know what kind of impact caused such devastation. The investigators have pieced together that your daughter was driving your car at 100 MPH. She tried to pass another vehicle, went into the other lane (slamming into the median) and the momentum threw the car into a toll booth. The car flipped over and she was still buckled into the vehicle by her seat belt. Eventually the belt broke and she slammed into the wreckage around her. The metal twisted her body. Her face and head were the worst damaged - which led to her instant death. As the car landed on it's roof her head was seriously injured - in essence she was decapitated from the crash. The scene was in fact horrific. Her body was still stuck in the wreckage and her head was squashed by the impact of the crash. She was only recognizable by her clothing, jewelery and other personal affects.

You then think about your wife. You don't want her to see the wreckage. She puts up a fight, saying that it is her daughter also. You know that a certain finality of your daughters death will only come from letting your wife see the mangled metal and flesh. Still you want to protect her from seeing what you have witnessed. She insists and you buckle - emotionally and physically you are spent - you give in. You let her see for herself the devastation. In your head you see images of your daughter as you remember her. Full of life and Spirit. She was a gorgeous young woman with the rest of her life in front of her. As you think of the best you keep going back to the crash scene and how her body laid in the wreckage. You then gather your strength and stand up emotionally for your wife who needs you now more than any other point in your marriage.

After the paperwork, identification and other police procedures you are allowed to go home and make preparations for the coming days funeral. You vow to keep the image of your daughters body away from your younger children, who are at home with other family members waiting anxiously for information about their sister. You will have a closed casket. You won't let your daughters, especially your youngest see the horrific damage caused to her sisters body. Nobody should have to see the images your eyes laid upon that night. Nobody! And you feel a sense of confidence that nobody will see the crash site, except for you, your wife and the team of police and EMS at the scene. But, unfortunately you live in a world consumed by the internet and despite your best efforts that night these haunting images will make your life hell for the year to come."

The above is a fictitious story I wrote about a young girl at the start of her life. Her name is Nikki Catsouras. On Halloween day of 2006 she stole her dad's Porsche 911 and went out cruising. The cruise turned deadly as she navigated the interstate at 100 MPH. She tried to pass another vehicle at 100 MPH and ended up hiting the concrete median. The vehicle crossed into the oncoming traffic and eventually slammed into a toll booth and crashed. The crash and impact probably killed the young girl quickly and without a doubt she felt no pain. However in the crash she was essentially decapitated.

Since the accident happened in California, pictures of the crash site were taken for the official report. The investigator who took the pictures sent them to the dispatch center for their report on the crash. The dispatcher then sent the pictures to another email account which he called a "personal" email account. So far there has been no official reason why the dispatcher sent official California Highway Patrol investigation pictures to a personal account.

The picture sending somehow didn't stop there. The images shortly made their way to the rest of the internet and eventually to the rest of the world. For many reasons the images circulated online (the most popular images include pictures of her pre-crash and then you see her corpse entangled in the car's wreckage). The crash scene images took on a life of their own and were posted in discussion forums, newsgroups, distributed through email lists, and posted pretty much everywhere! Nikki was a very cute girl. She was young. She was an aspiring model. The vehicle was an expensive sports car. And in an instant she was killed. Not just killed in a simple one gunshot to the chest kinda way, but in a gruesome scene that made seasoned investigators sick to their stomachs.

The images are not fun to look at. Yet I found myself looking at them when I first heard about this story. It's the same reason we all rubberneck at the scene of a traffic accident. We know we might see something bad. We may see a dead person still lying in the vehicle. But for some reason WE ALL look at the tumbled mess.

We do this for many different reasons. For a lot of us it brings our own mortality into focus. Some people get a kick out of gore and death. Most of us are just curious as to what happened. Since humans know of their impending death, we face it through a different lens than animals do. Death still makes even the most timid and scared person curious. And so we look at accidents. We watch shows like CSI. We look on the internet for pictures and video of gore and death.

However there is another side to this and this is what I'm here talking about. For Nikki's family the scene and horror didn't end at the crash site. For some reason the pictures have been emailed to them by hundreds of the black sheep of the internet citizens. Hundreds of sites have been created just to host the images. Fake myspace profiles have been created. At first the myspace profiles seemed like honest memorial profiles. But eventually the crash pictures are posted on the profile and people comment about how she had it coming to her.

Can you imagine seeing your daughter looking like that? Can you then imagine seeing pictures all over the web of the crash site? How about if dummy email accounts started to send you emails containing the photos?

Well this has led to the family suing the California Highway Patrol over the leaking of the photos to the outside. It is normal business for crash scene inspectors to send photos to the dispatch center who worked on the case. But what isn't normal is for the photos to be sent to private (nonwork) email accounts and then to the internet.

EMS, CSI and Police are a special breed and the squeamish don't last long! But just because it is routine for them to see such things doesn't mean it is ok for them to share pictures of crashes and murder scenes outside of those doing the investigations. But even when such stuff leaks to the world, why would you harass the family members who have already suffered enough through the loss of their daughter?

One of the worst things that has come out of the Internet (and this is something I feel is growing and becoming worse) is the hate mongering, the pissing contests, the random acts of cowardness, the anger, and general abuse that takes place from the anonymity of the internet. Many people think it is ok to bash people, post personal records and do harm. Nobody knows me as I sit behind the barrier of my screen and internet connection. But taking it to the next level and emailing people who have had family members commit suicide (especially children) and laughing at them. WTF? Who the fuck actually thinks such cowardness is cool?

I'm only comforted by my personal belief in Cosmic Karma. Meaning do good and good comes to you, do bad and only bad will come to you.

For more information about this story (especially the pending lawsuit) check out this ABC News Story. For the crash pictures I can only say that you really don't want to see them. But if you do then search and find them yourself. Remember though, that which has been seen cannot be unseen.

In the meantime people - be nice on the Internet. The Cosmos or God or whatever you believe in is watching you! He's right next to the ceiling cat!