According to Newsweek, the Catsouras disaster was “so horrific the coroner wouldn’t let her parents identify their daughter’s body.” As is customary when fatal car accidents occur, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers snapped images of the scene. These images were sent to coworkers, and they could also be accessed online.
Two CHP employees, Aaron Reich and Thomas O’Donnell, admitted distributing the pictures outside of the company’s rules. While O’Donnell stated in interviews that he only emailed the pictures to his personal email account for additional review, Reich alleged that he shared the pictures to four other people. The online photographs were uncovered by Catsouras’ parents. The photographs attracted a lot of attention, and one fake MySpace tribute page even linked to them.
The Catsouras family got copies of the pictures that were given anonymously via emails with fictitious subject lines. One picture was sent to the father with the message, “Daddy, yay! Hello, father. I remain here. In order to avoid their youngest daughter being teased by the images, the Catsouras family stopped accessing the Internet and began homeschooling her. Werner Herzog addressed the elements of cyber abuse in the case in his 2016 film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.
