It appears the Catsouras family is at it again. You might recall Nikki Catsouras – the girl who stole her Daddy’s car and crashed it into a tollbooth at an extremely high rate of speed, thus rendering her head into a faceless shell? Photographs of her highly public death made it onto the internet, and many of the morbidly curious (present company included) spent time gazing at her hideous corpse and reflecting about how important it is to drive carefully, lest one end up sharing the same fate. <\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the family found out about the photos when some cruel asshole sent one of them to Nikki’s father, thereby causing the family to try to eliminate the photos from the web. They contracted with a group called Reputation Defender that located the photos on the internet and sent “cease and desist” letters to try and encourage the webmasters to take the pictures down. I received one of their e-mails myself, and replied that I would not take down the photos because I felt that they were public domain and I also felt that they were important to see. In fact, I’d had several people write to me to say that they showed the photos to their teenage family members as a deterrent to speeding. Nikki was dead – why not use the photos to help other young people avoid her tragic fate?<\/p>\n
Last year I was contacted by 20\/20 to do an interview about the Catsouras case, but I declined. Good thing too, because the show, like most of them, was severely stacked against the morbidly curious and in favor of the censorship impulses of the family. I figured after that show, they would finally let Nikki rest in peace… but I guess I was wrong because Newsweek had a story about the family’s “legal struggles” recently:<\/p>\n