"This was an expensive car and it was a young girl and she was also a very pretty girl. "Everybody I know has either seen them or they know someone that's seen them," said Lesli Catsouras. At one point photos of Nikki's crash could be found on 1,600 Web sites in 50 countries. Who would want to look at such horrible images? Shockingly, the Catsouras family says many people. The Catsouras family has filed a lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol for allegedly releasing the accident scene pictures. Nikki's younger sisters were forbidden to use the Internet, and 16-year-old Danielle was taken out of school to be home schooled out of fear that her peers might confront her with the pictures. The pictures, taken by California Highway Patrol officers and e-mailed outside the department, became so persistent that Lesli Catsouras stopped checking her e-mail. "What type of individual would do that?" asked Christos Catsouras. A fake MySpace page was created, which at first looked like a tribute to Catsouras but also led to the horrific photos. The family soon began receiving anonymous e-mails and text messages that contained photographs of the accident, including pictures of Nikki's decapitated body, still strapped to the crumpled remains of her father's Porsche. "They didn't even let me see my daughter, and now the whole world is seeing my daughter," recalled Lesli Catsouras, Nikki's mother. The Catsouras family was told they should never see the photos from the scene of the horrendous accident.īut as the Catsouras family was grieving for their daughter, the accident scene photos showing Nikki's mutilated body suddenly appeared on the Internet. It's nothing that anyone should ever have to see," said Michael Fertik, the founder of ReputationDefender, a company that helps clients such as the Catsouras family remove items from the Internet. "Her head was more or less cut in two and sort of cleaved and then smashed. last Halloween, Nikki Catsouras was traveling 100 mph on State Route 241, near Lake Forest, Calif., when she clipped another car and lost control, going across lanes over the median and slamming into a concrete tollbooth. She had never driven the Porsche before.Īccording to state highway patrol reports, at approximately 1:45 p.m. She took the keys to her father's Porsche 911 Carrera, a car that goes zero to 60 miles an hour in less than five seconds. Then, her family says, Nikki did something out of character. "I said, 'Bye, see you at two-thirty, love you. "As I was walking out the door, I kind of winked and blew her a kiss, and she winked back and flipped me a peace sign," he recalled. Catsouras had no idea the next day would be the last time he'd ever see the daughter he called "Angel." "Nikki broke a house rule and we had a disagreement, and I took her car keys away," said Christos Catsouras, Nikki's father.
It all started with a typical fight between parents and teenager when Nikki got caught sneaking a cigarette in the house. She loved to shoot videos on her camera, and ironically, it was a camera that would memorialize Nikki's life and death as a gruesome and macabre joke on the Internet. Nikki Catsouras was an 18-year-old college freshman living in California with her parents and two sisters. For one family, an image that circulated on these types of Web sites added injury to already profound pain. There's an Internet subculture devoted to death and gore with thousands of images, each bloodier than the next. July 1, 2008— - With just a few mouse clicks, you can find pictures that are too graphic to show in the mainstream media - images of horrible accidents, mutilations and death.
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