The Coroner Wouldn't Let Nikki Catsouras's Parents See Her Body — Then Photos of Her Death Were Leaked

Nikki Catsouras would eventually be known as the Porsche girl, for incredibly gruesome and heartbreaking reasons. According to Newsweek, images of her death circulated online after California Highway Patrol officers forwarded them to friends. The incident occurred on Halloween in 2006, when Catsouras stole her father's car. She lost control, and crashed soon after.

Her parents believe this had something to do with the fact that Catsouras "ended up in the hospital in a cocaine-induced psychosis" the previous summer. The night before she died, Catsouras had once again used cocaine. They barely had time to grieve the loss of their daughter before they were fighting to get the leaked photos of her death scrubbed from the internet. Here's what we know.

Catsouras's family suspected that part of the reason why she reacted the way she did to the cocaine was due to the fact that age 8, doctors found a brain tumor. They said the radiation treatment might cause impaired judgment or impluse controls issues in the future. They might never know. On the day she took the car, her father Christos Catsouras was speaking with a 9-1-1 dispatcher when police flew by him. The operator confirmed a black Porsche had been in an accident.

He rushed to the crash site, and was met with a horrific scene. The car was almost completely crumpled, but Christos was able to recognize it based on a single visible hubcap. He was told by police that his daughter had been driving 100mph when she clipped another car, thus causing her to flip over the median and crash into a concrete wall. The autopsy would reveal she still had cocaine in her system.

Thomas O'Donnell, 39, and Aaron Reich, 30 were the highway patrol officers who took the now infamous photos of Catsouras. Reich's lawyer claimed the pictures were sent to friends as part of a cautionary tale. "Any young person that sees these photos and is goaded into driving more cautiously or less recklessly—that's a public service," said their attorney. The Catsouras family didn't feel that way.

The Catsouras family hired their own lawyer, and a "tech company called Reputation Defender that works to remove malicious content from the Web," per Newsweek. Sadly it was just too much, even for the experts. In January 2012, six years after Catsouras' death, the California Highway Patrol settled to the tune of $2.37 million in damages, reported the Los Angeles Times.

In 2010 Christos told the Los Angeles Times that he was determined to get every photo of his daughter's death removed from the internet. He knew it was an impossible task, but he still had to try.