- Nikki Catsouras Death Photographs - Nikki Catsouras Dead - Death Photographs Nikki Catsouras died October 31, 2016 in a fatal car accident. She was barely 18-year-old at the time of her death. Speed was considered to be factor in the accident that took her life. Nikki Catsouras (Nikki Catsura or nikki castagneto) was traveling in a Porsche 911.
- Braunstein's site never posted the crime scene photos from Nikki Catsouras' death, but he has posted other accident photos. With thousands of sites like Braunstein's, there is no shortage of places to find disturbing images.
- The Nikki Catsouras photos contention concerns the spilled photos of Nicole 'Nikki' Catsouras death (March 4, 1988 – October 31, 2006), who passed on at 18 years old in a rapid auto accident in the wake of losing control of a Porsche 911 Carrera, which had a place with her dad, and slamming into a toll corner in Lake Forest, California.
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Nikki’s family is proceeding with a lawsuit, which will get a jury trial to determine if the California Highway Patrol must take responsibility for its employees’ conduct of releasing the graphic photos outside the agency — CHP has admitted to the Catsouras family that its dispatchers violated department policy by releasing the photos. Nikki Catsouras was killed in a horrible car crash on Halloween day of 2006. The 18-year-old Orange County, California, resident had been driving her father’s black Porsche 911 Carrera at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour when she lost control of the vehicle and smashed into a concrete tollbooth.
Published Apr 25, 2009 From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009
This is a story about a photo—an image so horrific we can't print it in NEWSWEEK. The picture shows the lifeless body of an 18-year-old Orange County girl named Nikki Catsouras, who was killed in a devastating car crash on Halloween day in 2006. The accident was so gruesome the coroner wouldn't allow her parents, Christos and Lesli Catsouras, to identify their daughter's body. But because of two California Highway Patrol officers, a digital camera and e-mail users' easy access to the 'Forward' button, there are now nine photos of the accident scene, taken just moments after Nikki's death, circulating virally on the Web. In one, her nearly decapitated head is drooping out the shattered window of her father's Porsche.
The Web is full of dark images, so perhaps the urge to post these tragic pictures isn't surprising. But for the Catsouras family, the photos are a daily torment. Just days after Nikki's death, her father, a local real-estate agent, clicked open an e-mail that appeared to be a property listing. Onto his screen popped his daughter's bloodied face, captioned with the words 'Woohoo Daddy! Hey daddy, I'm still alive.' Nikki's sisters—Danielle, 18, Christiana, 16, and Kira, 10—have managed to avoid the photos, but live in fear that they'll happen upon them. And so the Catsourases are spending thousands in legal fees in an attempt to stop strangers from displaying the grisly images—an effort that has transformed Nikki's death into a case about privacy, cyber-harassment and image control.
Porsche Girls Car Accident
The Catsourases are by no means the first to suffer at the hands of cyber-aggressors. But their story is unique in that it touches on so many of the ways the Web has become perverted: as an outlet for morbid curiosities, a space where cruel behavior suffers little consequence and an uncontrollable forum in which things that were once private—like photos of the dead—can go public in an instant. The case also illustrates how the law has struggled to define how legal concepts like privacy and defamation are translated into an online world.
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From the beginning, Nikki's death had all the makings of a sensational story. She was gorgeous; it was Halloween, and she was driving a $90,000 sports car. She was from Orange County; the Beverly Hills 90210 of the housewives-filled suburbs. And from the outside, the Catsourases seemed to have it all: Christos and Lesli and their four beautiful girls lived in a planned community with man-made parks and multimillion-dollar homes. The family ate dinner together almost every night; their best friends lived next door.
But the family's life wasn't as idyllic as it seemed. In third grade, Nikki was diagnosed with a brain tumor that doctors didn't think she'd survive. It turned out to be benign, but 8-year-old Nikki had to undergo intensive radiation, and doctors told her parents the effects of that treatment on her young brain might show up someday—perhaps by causing changes in her judgment, or impulse control. Her family believes that's why, the summer before the accident, Nikki tried cocaine and ended up in the hospital in a cocaine-induced psychosis. She used cocaine again the night before the accident, her family says. Lesli and Christos discussed checking her into a hospital, but decided against it: she was to visit a psychiatrist the next day, a specialist on brain disorders. So they let her sleep it off, and the next day, the three of them ate lunch together.