CHP Dispatcher Denies Wrongdoing in Distributing Crash Victim Photos

In the 3+ years that HolyCoast.com has been around, easily the most searched story and the one that has generated far more Google hits than anything else was a story I had in 2006 about an 18 year old girl who ran her father's Porsche into a concrete toll booth at 100 mph. That story, and several follow-up stories generated tremendous interest because grisly photos of the crash scene were released on the internet and for some reasons thousands of people wanted to see them. I never posted the photos, but I did do my best to make fools and losers out of the people who spent their Internet time searching for gruesome pictures of a dead teenager.

Today there's another story on the case involving the CHP dispatcher who allegedly released the photos:

LANCASTER - A California Highway Patrol dispatcher, speaking publicly for the first time about a high-profile lawsuit blaming him for photos of a dead teen proliferating on the Internet, said he feels sorry for her family but that he did nothing wrong.

"Why am I here?" Thomas O'Donnell said in a quiet voice as he sat in his attorney's office. "I didn't do anything wrong."

The lawsuit accuses O'Donnell, 38, and another CHP dispatcher of illegally transmitting to the public gory images of car-crash victim Nicole "Nikki" Catsouras – turning her into an online sensation and further traumatizing her grieving Ladera Ranch family.

Nikki took her father's Porsche without his permission on Oct. 31, 2006, and slammed it into a toll plaza in Lake Forest. Just weeks after her death, pictures of her corpse began appearing on Web sites – many of which specialize in morbid curiosities.

Her parents sued the CHP after the agency took responsibility for the leaked images, which are supposed to be used only for investigative purposes....

O'Donnell admitted to violating CHP policy by sending the images to his private e-mail account to view on his unsecured home computer – but said he did so for work purposes. He said he was too busy to look at the images at work.

Dispatchers and other CHP officials routinely review and reproduce grisly images of car crashes for training purposes and to educate the public about the dangers of driving recklessly or while under the influence.

The Catsouras family is seeking at least $20 million in damages from the CHP, O'Donnell and another dispatcher, Aaron Reich, claiming violation of privacy, negligence and infliction of emotional distress.

Well, that ought to be worth another 10,000 hits.

Whether or not the dispatcher meant any harm in initially emailing the photos, he certainly set up a firestorm on the Internet as an amazing number of people tried to find them. Those photos caused the family a lot of additional grief and clearly should never have been released from the official CHP files. I think the family is probably on pretty firm ground in their lawsuit.