Buckle your seat belts, people, this one is going to be a wild and fast ride over bumpy ground.
I just read the Newsweek Article about Nikki Catsouras, and I'm disgusted. And yes, I'm going to give you the link to the site where the photographs are posted.
Note: the Catsouras family had the original website and it's address somehow captured for their own use. The original link now goes not to a site that shows the horror of the crash, but the "horror" of showing the photos of the crash. The internet being what it is, there's always another site that can pick up the slack: Be prepared to be sickened; it's horrific.
http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/f10/nicole-catsouras-nikki-lost-control-porsche-hits-toll-booth-gory-pictures-1248/
And I don't mean about the photographs - I hope the publicity makes them the most popular photographs on the internet.
That's the point - imagine seeing this crash, realizing what factors allowed it to happen, ponder what else could have happened, and then ask yourself, the Catsouras family is going to do the world "good" by standing up to people who publish the photographs?
What about the accident? http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/f10/nicole-catsouras-nikki-lost-control-porsche-hits-toll-booth-gory-pictures-1248/ That doesn't bother them, but the photos are the real issue?
And to the Family? Here's what I have to say to you directly:
There was another car in this story - it was "clipped".
There was a toll booth in this story - the car landed two feet from a door that is designed for the ingress/egress of humans. There are a dozen other places where other people could have been killed in this story, literally a thousand other opportunities for disaster from the moment she left the driveway.
And that's the point. Take a good look at the aerial map and the trajectory of the Porsche - it crossed two lanes of oncoming traffic which normally would have been traveling at highway speed in the opposite direction, another lane coming from the toll booth traveling slower but also in the opposite direction, and the car ultimately stopped only when it smashed into an uninhabited part of the building.
You've figured this out already, right? How many cars got lucky that she didn't nail them head on (do the math - if Nikki was doing 100 mph, and the opposite lane of traffic was doing 60-80 - how much more horrific would this have been if she had not merely "clipped" the other car? That's a 160-180 mph collision.)
Now imagine the toll booth - do you think the people that operate and maintain a toll booth expect to be dodging oncoming traffic at 100 mph? The rest of us get tickets if we're going much faster than 15 MPH even with an EZ-Pass lane.
So, how many degrees of variation would we have to apply to the ten thousand different variables in the equations of this nightmare for the story to have been a lot different? Not many. What if the headline had read: "An innocent driver and three passengers were killed in a head on crash, caused by a girl driving her father's car without his permission at a high rate of speed, who had a history of cocaine use, and cocaine in her system.
The autopsy photos are what the family is upset about; instead of being grateful there weren't more bodies - innocent people - to bury for no good reason.
And did I also read that they claim that this whole thing is some "condition" that makes her vulnerable to the effects of cocaine? Holy shit - holy shit - are you fucking kidding me? As if without the genetic mutation, a "normal" person doing cocaine would not have been a problem in this story?
How many pebbles would have to be shifted to a different location to make this story not about the horrific release of the autopsy photos, but how a stupid decision by a reckless person who had the opportunity because of the carelessness of her parents cost the lives of how many other people?
To the Catsouras family: Shut the fuck up. You have no idea what monsters you are. For all the times I have been told "be grateful it wasn't worse" - and I hate hearing that - does the Catsouras family even have a clue how this story would be so much different than who released the autopsy photos if Nikki's land rocket had taken out other cars filled with other people?
My mother, born in 1939, graduated from High school in 1956, told me about the day after her Senior prom; the parents of two students killed in an accident on the night of the prom had the wreckage towed to the high school - where it stayed for the next year - to show and remind the students the consequences of drinking and driving and having "fun" behind the wheel of a car.
But I'll do you one better - I'm going to take the lack of personal responsibility you have shown for any of this - did I read that you're seeking $20 Million dollars in damages? - and call you outright whores. And here's why: You aren't the only ones who have suffered the loss of someone you love, and what happens to the image of the aftermath ought not to even be on your top 1000 list of sorrows if you had a heart to begin with.
Here's a diary I wrote about the sport I enjoy being a spectator of: NHRA Top Fuel Drag Racing. Before 2008, they used to cover 1320 feet - four football fields - in 4.5 seconds, and the highest recorded speed across the finish line was 337 miles per hour.
That's 430 feet per second.
You'd think these guys would be dropping like flies - and indeed talented men with the best safety that engineering can provide have died. The very first race I ever went to, saw the death of Blaine Johnson in 1996. Darrel Russel was killed in 2004, Eric Medlen was killed in testing in 2007, and I was at the track watching with my own eyes as Scott Kalitta desperately tried to stop his car at 330 miles per hour as an engine fire melted his parachutes and he slammed into a steel pole designed to catch him from running off the track at over 130 miles per hour.
And because of that, they now only race to 1000 feet - a full football field and both endzones shorter - and still manage to reach 310 miles per hour in 4.0 seconds.
And here's where irony meets sickening reality. One of these NHRA top fuel drivers, Doug Herbert - who still pushes these limits a dozen times every weekend for a living - lost both of his sons, the oldest 17 (driving) and the youngest 14, a helpless passenger, in a passenger car on a public highway on their way to McDonalds.
That's right - on their way to McDonalds. Not the kind of situation where one woudld need fire-retardant suits with boots, and gloves, and a head-sock; not the kind of situation where one would need fire extinguishers, a helmet, head and neck restraints, and a safety crew on standby only 50 feet away. The older of the two brothers, a newly licensed driver, tried to pass on a double-yellow line and hit another car head on. Both he and his brother were killed. And do you know what Doug Herbert is doing about it?
He's not filing lawsuits about how traumatized he is over the autopsy photos. He's on the road - promoting a program that he created called "BRAKES" - Be Responsible And Keep Everyone Safe. And you ought to know that my heart aches and I cry every time I watch the interview of him, admitting to the entire TV audience that his own son was reckless, and that is what got him and his brother killed. Amazingly enough in that story, the other driver was not killed either.
So to hear the Catsouras family think the photographs are the issue here pisses me the fuck off.
Here's a quote from another article - and I need some verification on this quote, but if it's accurate, take everything I said in this diary and muliply by 12.
"The bottom line is, teenagers sometimes do stupid things," Lesli Catsouras said.
If that is the "bottom line" in this family, not only do I have utterly no sympathy for any of them, they deserve no mercy. Their indifference to the potential consequences that they were unfathomably fortunate to have avoided is paralyzingly unconscionable.
How can anyone be that indifferent to what took place?
But it gets worse - Leslie, the mother, says,
"The fact is that we will never get rid of the photos anyway," says Lesli, Nikki's mother. "So we have made a decision to make something good come out of this horrible bad."
I'm paralyzed with disbelief that these selfish narcissists think that they're the one's who have suffered here - like the real problem is not that a young girl had a drug problem, an emotional problem, that her parents have so much more money and luxury and comfort that any of us will ever dream of and seem to be indifferent to all of that - but the real tragedy is that they can't live with the image of the girls head split wide open.
The image is what bothers them - not so much how it got that way.
I wish you could watch me seething with rage right now. I am so disgusted.
Who are these people?
Who's fault was it that this girl is dead? (It can't be the Nikki's fault or her parents or any of a dozen other factors in this story, right?)
Who's fault was it that there isn't anyone else dead? (well we don't need to think about that because it didn't happen, so just leave them alone)
But the thing that has you seeking TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS - ONLY because of that - is the wretched autopsy photographs?
No effort to address what caused the accident.
No effort to address prevention and some thought given to all the factors involved.
Just your own personal trauma over the photographs.
Spare me.
Get lost.
Do you know why I'm so pissed at you?
Because we still have almost half of this country frantic and hysterical and looking at their own neighbors and family like we're enemies of the state because they have an obsessive fear of terrorism. Terrorism -
Let's take a look at the top causes of death in the United States in the year 2001, the year 2,978 Americans were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the revolt of the passengers of United Flight 93:
NationalVital Statistics Reports,Vol. 52, No.3, September 18, 2003
The 15 leading causes of death in 2001 were as follows:
700,000 - Diseases of heart (heart disease)
550,000 - Malignant neoplasms (cancer)
163,000 - Cerebrovascular diseases (stroke)
120,000 - Chronic lower respiratory diseases (lung disease)
97,700 - Accidents (unintentional injuries)
71,000 - Diabetes mellitus (diabetes)
62,000 - Influenza and pneumonia Alzheimer’s disease
39,000 - Nephritis (kidney disease)
32,000 - Septicemia (infection)
29,000 - Intentional self-harm (suicide)
27,000 - Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis
20,000 - Assault (homicide)
20,000 - Essential (primary) hypertension and hypertensive renal
disease (hypertension)
See terrorism in the top ten?
I don't. I see suicide...that ought to be a sign.
Suicide and Homicide in the top ten, and let's call the 100,000 accidents a form of suicide and homicide. Either the one who caused it lost their life, or the poor unsuspecting victim who couldn't get out of the way in time.
Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death in people of all ages from 2 to 33 years in the US 2000 (Traffic Safety Facts, National Center for Statistics and Analysis, NHTSA, 2003)
Estimated 1.48 people died per 100 million vehicle miles of travel in the US 2003 (Traffic Safety Facts, National Center for Statistics and Analysis, NHTSA, 2003)
Estimated 117 deaths each day were caused by motor vehicle crashes in the US 2003 (Traffic Safety Facts, National Center for Statistics and Analysis, NHTSA, 2003) .
If you want to put that in perspective you can hardly grasp, the average number of people on the most popular airliner in the US, a Boeing 737, is about 120 people.
Do you think we'd be so absurdly indifferent if a planload full of people fell out of the sky and killed everyone aboard - every day of the year?
Stupid, careless, preventable accidents. And we even have libertarians who think it's some kind of salute to patriotism to take their seat belt and helmets off just to thumb their nose at what they see as the "Nanny State".
So we're indifferent to what we can change; what is in our control - and yet we're obsessed with the causes that are at the extremes: The war on drugs: What causes the violence in death, the drugs, or the criminal network because it's still illegal. Almost a hundred years after we gave up on trying to legislate morality with Prohibition of alcohol, we're still at it with everything from prescription drugs to marijuana.
But cars? Hey, we all gotta get somewhere, so it's just a price we think is worth all the misery that comes with it.
We've got people being put in jail left and right for drug offenses, and while these people are bitching about the autopsy photos, I don't see much responsibility being addressed because their daughter had cocaine in her system. For all of us who think that drugs ought to be legal, Nikki Catsouras just gave the drug police another reason to keep arresting people, thanks for that.
So do I think you have a case in recovering "damages" for the showing of the autopsy photos?
No way. You should be paying for those pictures to be blown up to real-life scale, and to be posted in every drug rehab center and high school and college campus in America.
Hey - a lot of us lose people we love in horrific ways. Let's ponder the alternative, Mr. Catsouras - I watched my father drink himself do death after having half his mouth and tongue cut out to remove cancer; But he still kept smoking and drinking. I was forced to watch the slow self-destruction of someone I loved, who in his last eigth years let his own bad habits gradually make his quality of life so unbearable, that he passed up the morphine that the doctor had prescribed, and instead chose to drink himself to death with two half-gallons of gin in a single day.
Was it more traumatic for you to see your photos go public, or for me to have to watch all that in private and listen to those who knew about it tell me there was "nothing I could do"?
Was it less traumatic to watch that with my own eyes over the course of eight years; the last two being so agonizing that the shrinks in town locked me up rather than come and get him, than it is for the Katsuras family to have seen the autopsy photos?
So now we're measuring the value of someone's life by the image of how it ended.
Oh this is going to be ugly indeed.
You can just take your little act and go the fuck home. I am so disgusted, so repulsed, so unsympathetic with your little charade of pitty and lack of remorse, I hope they charge you back for the legal fees of your own case.
How dare you.
How dare you.
You know it is a matter of fractions of an inch that made the difference between your daughter being the only victim in this (I'll admit senseless tragedy) and the possibility of there having been many more victims.
You have the luxury -- yes, the luxury -- of knowing that your daughter merely "clipped" another car, and that the ballistic weapon that was your precious fucking Porche did not destroy the toll booth and who knows how many other people or vehicles.
You should be forced to have that picture printed on a T-Shirt, and be made to wear it while walking through every shopping mall in the country for the next ten years. And show the world that you're not a victim in this story because the photos were leaked; you're the luckiest father in California because his reckless and out of control daughter didn't kill anyone else with his fucking hot-rod Porsche that he bought to show off his wealth and deal with his mid-life crisis.
How dare you.
Go home already. And be grateful for all the headstones you don't have to apologize for, you selfish stupid fools.
I downloaded the photos so that if they get taken down, I can put them up again.
So sue me. To think that any of us have some right to privacy in this day and age is a pretty bizarre fantasy in itself; If I went out and caused such an accident that killed someone else and I had lived; do you think that I would be able to keep the photos private if the family of who I killed wanted to make them example of my reckless behavior?
How can it be anyone can declare the right to keep private an event that happened in full view of those forced to witness it live with their own eyes, and yet a captured photo of that event is an invasion of privacy?
Privacy? This was an event that took place in the open on a public road - where's the privacy?
Do you really want to tell me - I can't even believe you're going to give me the opportunity to write this - do you really want to tell me that somehow the death of your daughter under the given circumstances would be less traumatic, and easier for you to deal with if only it weren't for the photographs?
Are you fucking kidding?
Do something right for once in your life.
Drop the goddamn lawsuit, and call up Doug Herbert. You can google him yourself. I'm sure he would welcome the opportunity to have you to join him in his BRAKES program, and instead of you trying to get rich(er) from the lawsuit over the autopsy photos, why don't you do what you can to make sure that some other kid doesn't use his or her father's car as a loaded weapon??
You still have shown little evidence of how grateful you should be - but don't seem to be - that your daughter is the only one dead in this story.
I cant' believe you have the gall; the unmitigated gall, to think you're a victim in this story.
You could have locked up the goddamn keys, Dad. Like any good father would to keep his kids away from loaded weapons. Then again given the galactic stupidity and shameless bravado of the NRA in this country, I almost expect to see you on tour with them bragging about the freedom to own Porsches without having to use a "trigger lock" mandated by the nanny state government.
Funny how nobody in the conservative movement gets it that a Nanny is only needed when the kids can't behave properly by themselves.
Drop the lawsuit and go home.
I'm sorry for your loss, but you don't seem to be at all.
And that's the story here.
