Now, 2 ½ years after the fatal accident, Christos and Lesli Catsouras are still confronted by horrifying images of Nikki's death that are circulating on the Internet, Newsweek magazine reports.
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Nikki was killed in a car crash on Halloween day in 2006, after taking her father's Porsche 911 Carrera without permission. According to police reports, Nikki was traveling 100 mph on State Route 241, near Lake Forest, Calif., when she struck another car and lost control, ultimately slamming into a concrete tollbooth. She died instantly.
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As is routine in fatal accidents, the California Highway Patrol took photos of the crash, including gruesome images showing Nikki's nearly decapitated head covered in blood. Authorities never showed these photos to Nikki's family. The coroner said it would be too upsetting for Christos and Lesli Catsouras to see their daughter's body, even to identify it.
But two CHP officers leaked the photos, and the images quickly began circulating over the Internet, turning up on everything from pornography sites to social networking services, Newsweek said.
Even Nikki's grieving father couldn't avoid the pictures. Days after the crash, the real estate developer opened an e-mail he believed was a property listing and found instead a grisly photo of his daughter's body.
Nikki's three sisters have never seen the photos, but the family lives "in fear of the pictures," Christos Catsouras told Newsweek. "And our kids will never Google their name without the risk of seeing them."
The Catsouras family has launched a series of legal fights to try to get the images off the Internet and to promote greater privacy protection on the Web.
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With the help of attorney Keith Bremer and a tech company called Reputation Defender, the family first pursued individual Web sites that displayed the photos, issuing them cease and desist orders. Those efforts ultimately proved futile.
They then sued the CHP for negligence, privacy invasion and infliction of emotional harm, in hopes of setting a precedent to discourage leaks in the future. In March 2008, a Superior Court judge called the officers' conduct "utterly reprehensible" but dismissed the lawsuit, saying they hadn't broken the law. The Catsouras family has appealed the ruling.
The family acknowledged to Newsweek that telling their story might have the unfortunate result of prompting some to seek out the crash photos. But they decided to come forward in hopes of saving other families from the pain they've endured.
"The fact is that we will never get rid of the photos anyway," Lesli Catsouras, Nikki's mother, told Newsweek. "So we have made a decision to make something good come out of this horrible bad."
Get the full story from Newsweek magazine.
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Seattle Police Department / AP
Seattle Police Department / AP
