Nikki Catsouras Death Photographs: January 1, 2008- -With only two mouse clicks, you can access images that are way too graphic to display pictures of horrific injuries, mutilations, and even death in mainstream media.
It's an Internet subculture dedicated to gore and death, with hundreds of pictures, every more bloody than before. For one family, one image circulated on these websites added insult to already painful discomfort.
Nikki Catsouras was an 18-year-old college freshman who lived in California along with two of her sisters and parents. She was a fan of shooting videos with her camera. Ironically enough, the camera was used to memorialize her life and death in insanity and macabre prank on the Internet.
The whole thing began with a usual argument between teenagers and parents after Nikki was found smoking cigarettes in the home.
"Nikki broke a house rule, and we had a disagreement, and I took her car keys away," said Christos Catsouras, Nikki's father. Catsouras didn't know that the next day was the final time Nikki would ever see him. Daughter, he referred to as "Angel."
"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 remembered. "I said, 'Bye, see you at two-thirty, love you. She said, 'Love you, bye.'"
Her family later claims Nikki did something out of her normal behavior. She got the keys to his father's Porsche 911 Carrera, a vehicle that can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in five minutes. She'd never driven a Porsche before.
According to the state highway patrol reports, around 1:45 p.m. the night before Halloween, Nikki Catsouras was traveling 100 mph along State Route 241 near Lake Forest, Calif. She was struck by another vehicle and lost control, driving across the median before crashing into the concrete tollbooth. Nikki was instantly killed. "Her head was more or less cut in two and sort of cleaved and then smashed. It's nothing that anyone should ever have to see," said Michael Fertik, the founder of ReputationDefender, which assists clients such as the Catsouras family get their items off the Internet. The Catsouras family was told they shouldn't ever see photographs from that scene. Terrible accident.
However, as the Catsouras family grieved over Nikki's daughter, tragic pictures of Nikki's broken body appeared online on the Internet. "They didn't even let me see my daughter, and now the whole world is seeing my daughter," recalls Lesli Catsouras, Nikki's mother.
The family was soon receiving messages and emails which contained photos of the incident, including pictures of Nikki's decapitated body that was still attached to the smashed remains of the father's Porsche. An untrue MySpace page was made that first appeared as an homage to Catsouras but was also the cause of horrifying images.
What type of individual would do that?
The photos captured by California Highway Patrol officers and sent to outside departments were so constant that Lesli Catsouras stopped checking her email. Nikki's younger sisters were barred from accessing the Internet, and the 16-year-old Danielle was taken off of school to be homeschooled, out of fear of the possibility that classmates could confront her about the photos.
Catsouras family has filed a lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol. Catsouras family is suing an action to the California Highway Patrol for the alleged release of photos from the scene of an accident.
Who would ever want to gaze at such images? Incredibly the Catsouras family has said that a lot of people. At one time, photos of Nikki's wreck could be seen on over 1,600 websites in 50 countries.
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"Everybody I know has either seen them, or they know someone that's seen them," said Lesli Catsouras. "This was an expensive car, and it was a young girl and a beautiful girl. It was also Halloween, so it was just the perfect recipe for something like this."
Although the Catsourases employed ReputationDefender to take the images from the Internet, the photos live on. "It spreads in bursts, and when it spreads, it happens very fast," Fertik said. Fertik.
"Whether right or wrong doesn't even matter when you're online. The digital world has no morals," said Ron Braunstein, who goes under the moniker Necro. Braunstein is self-described as a death-rapper who has made a name for utilizing gore in his songs and on his website.
"I've built a career around exploitation. I consider what I do real, everything is real, death is real," Braunstein stated. Braunstein said that his goal isn't to frighten people. "They're intrigued; they're into it."
Braunstein's website has not posted crime scene photos of Nikki Catsouras' death, but he has uploaded several other pictures of accidents. With thousands of websites similar to Braunstein's, there are plenty of sites to search for disturbing images.
"This is very damaging. It's desensitizing some people. It's feeding into the perversion of some people. It's one thing when no one suffers; it's very much another thing to be involved in the suffering of others," said Dr. Gail Saltz, a psychiatrist.
"We all have some primitive human emotions about sadism," Saltz declared. " There is something extremely satisfying about watching others be injured, brutally beaten or even suffer violent violence."
Saltz warns that although curiosity is normal, obsessiveness over images that aren't healthy can be. If someone is pretty obsessed with it and staring at it, I would often consider it the definition of a fetish. I would think it to be a perversion."
On the anniversary of Nikki's death, Nikki's family Catsouras family put together the video in memory of Nikki, complete with their photos of Nikki, and set to the track "Angel."
"I feel like no one realized she was a person, and they, in a sick way, got entertained by this photograph, and it's just sad that someone can feel the need to put it out and keep it going on and harming others by putting it up," said Danielle Nikki's sister.
"We are a real family with real hearts," Nikki's father told her. "And it hurts what people are doing." Also See: Susan Attenborough