The Annointed Fig

What is it about the Catholic Church that turns perfectly normal men into pedophiles?  Sexual deprivation?  That’s it?  Doesn’t speak highly of our species if not getting any is all it takes to have us start raping young boys or girls supposedly in both our spiritual and physical care.

We are all special on the net.

And what is it, for that matter, about the Internet that turns us into raving loonies drawn to ask about people’s bra sizes, get into pointless flame wars, put our jobs and families in jeopardy while we painstakingly append wings onto penises and make them swoop onto Second Life newbies like Red Barons onto unsuspecting enemy planes?

Or, worse yet, begin and proliferate the sites featuring Nikki Casouras crime scene photos, live (or, rather, very much dead) and in vivid Technicolor?  What could possibly be fascinating about something as horrific as that?  Then again…

The link I am providing does not feature these photos, but though curiosity hasn’t yet killed me like that proverbial cat, this latest bout of it (and of a decidedly morbid kind) will likely leave me with nightmares, because under the guise of doing thorough research, I did search for them, and let me tell you two things.  One, they are disturbingly easy to find, and another, they are…disturbing.  That’s it.  Saw and Final Destination franchises have nothing on these.

And when you take into account the fact that these are real photos taken by officers on the scene of the young woman’s high-impact car crash, the “God forbid!” factor rises like a Geiger counter reading after an atomic bomb goes off a few miles upwind.

For those not in the know about what SHOULD be world wide web’s best kept secret, Nikki, then 18, had an argument with her parents over trying cocaine for what had been the second time in her life.  According to mom Lesli, the first, due to an inoperable brain tumor discovered 10 years prior to the fatal accident, a few weeks before had landed her daughter in the hospital for 3 days.  The altered brain chemistry combined with cocaine has caused a type of a psychotic break.

On Halloween of 2006, having been suspected of for the second time dipping into the poison, Nikki had her own car keys confiscated and her father order her to get ready for another hospital stay.  Ms. Catsouras, already at that moment under the influence, responded by grabbing the keys to her father’s Porshe and taking off down the highway at over 100 mph.

The resulting crash had landed a driver of another car, a law-abiding Honda Civic, in ER with minor injuries (a three-year old case against Nikki’s parents is still pending) and Nikki dead.  The coroner, who had chosen not to release the photos to the family so as not to cause unnecessary trauma, had ruled the death had been instantaneous, and if there is one silver lining to the whole sorry mess, it is that.

Unfortunately, the two policeman on the site of the crash the very next day leaked these images on the net, and the witch hunt on the relatives of a “rich girl” who had gotten what was coming to her was on.  The pictures were being passed around.  The girl’s MySpace page has been hacked and made into a repository of all the gore.  The sickos wrote the distraught family gruesome, Halloween-themed letters — attaching the photos, lest their thought processes go misunderstood.  And little by little, the younger members, those that by a lucky twist of fate, didn’t end up being exposed to the horror, came to actually fear being on line or Googling for their name.

Having had enough, the California family sued the State Highway Patrol for $20 million, and though the department offered its apologies for its role in the fiasco, and one officer responsible had been canned (“for unrelated reasons”) and another suspended for 25 days, by March 21, 2008, Judge Steven L. Perk dismissed the case stating the Highway Patrol was under no obligation to spare the privacy of the Catsouras clan.  Considering as of last year, completely without the family’s permission, a local college was using these photos in one of its criminal-law classes, the judge seems to be in the right — or, at least, within the letter of our precedent-based law.

Required reading before Internet use?

That said, the family is continuing the crusade.  I am not sure other than bringing awareness to the issue of Internet exploitation and all-permissiveness it is accomplishing much these days, but bringing continued exposure to these photos.  All publicity, even of the negative sort, is a good publicity to the sites of the ilk I found on the front page of Nikki Catsouras (aka Porshe Girl) Google search.  Even Christos and Lesli themselves admit that the continued press exposure may drive some, like yours truly, to seek out the photos they might not have been aware of before reading about them in more reputable news outlets.

So, what is the point behind opening old wounds and digging for maggots?  The past is dead and gone, and though I wish the redoubtable officers of the Cali Highway Patrol received worse than a slap on the wrist for their grotesque violation of, at least, a moral if not a legal code, there is nothing to be achieved keeping the war going.  Even if the family received this money, what would it do with it?  Get rich on their little girl’s death?

Or would they give it to charity?  Even that wouldn’t fill that gaping emptiness they might still be feeling — while sapping the funds from the State of California already so badly pressed by the global economic downturn.

Who would win even if the higher court overruled Judge Perk — other than lawyers?  And I don’t know about you, but to me, despite the best efforts of Reputation Defender, a tech company hired by the victim’s parents to disseminate the futile cease and desist notes, this doesn’t sound like a sort of resolution designed to cleanse the net of similarly grotesque imagery — or let Nikki get on with whatever has welcomed her on the other side in peace.

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