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Crime

Teenaged YouTube 'Counter-Strike' Star Dies, Kills Two In Fiery Wrong-Way Highway Crash (sandiegouniontribune.com) 345

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports: The 18-year-old who sped the wrong way down state Route 805 Thursday, crashing into a SUV and killing himself, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, was a YouTube star who had made a small fortune in video gaming gambling, according to authorities and hundreds of gaming fans on Twitter. The California Highway Patrol identified him Friday as Trevor Heitmann of San Diego. But the nearly 900,000 subscribers to his YouTube video channel and his Twitter followers knew him as "McSkillet"...

Kevin Hitt, editor in chief of VPesport.com online gaming news outlet, said Valve, under constraints from the state of Washington gambling commission, confiscated about $200,000 worth of McSkillet's skins and shut down his ability to acquire more.

VPEsports reports: Heitmann was one of the biggest names in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO) skin trading when in late 2017, Valve, developers of CSGO, banned all of Heitmann's Steam platform accounts, shutting down his entire skin trading and collecting empire... The ban by Valve precluded Heitmann from being able to unbox, gamble, or trade skins which directly affected his ability to monetize his YouTube videos which saw viewer counts anywhere between 250,000 to 4.3 million. He hasn't posted a video since....

Before the fatal crash, Heitmann purposely drove his vehicle into the Ashley Falls Elementary School front gate that had a sign on the front that had the word "STEAM" printed on it in reference to a magnet program which supports science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. After breaking a window, he then drove onto the soccer field, spinning his car in circles a couple of times before leaving.

A CHP office says Heitmann's speed was estimated at over 100 miles per hour before his final fiery crash -- and that Heitmann's $250,000 McLaren sports car "disintegrated", while the SUV was so badly burned investigators couldn't determine whether its two passengers -- Aileen Pizarro and her 12-year-old daughter Aryana Pizarro -- had been wearing seat belts.

Aileen's 22-year-old son has started a GoFundMe page "to help aid my family with funeral costs and any additional expenses related to Aileen and Aryana's deaths."
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Teenaged YouTube 'Counter-Strike' Star Dies, Kills Two In Fiery Wrong-Way Highway Crash

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  • Suicide (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25, 2018 @06:06AM (#57191252)

    Committing suicide is one thing, but in do it in such a manner that you take other innocent lives with you, is fucking horribly twisted. Almost makes me wish that a Hell really does exist.

    • Re:Suicide (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday August 25, 2018 @07:02AM (#57191454)

      Committing suicide is one thing, but in do it in such a manner that you take other innocent lives with you, is fucking horribly twisted.

      It sounds like typical psychological projection [rationalwiki.org]. He felt he was wrongly punished. So he lashed out, using the justification that if an "innocent" such as himself could be made to suffer, then it was OK for him to make another innocent suffer.

      I've had to caution a couple of my friends who "struck it rich" from a single income source like he did. Don't blow your money on toys and transient things like fast cars and hot women. Save it, invest it, use it to diversify your income stream. That way if that original income source disappears, you're not left high and dry like he was. Worst case you just have to reintegrate into society like a regular person, except you have a huge nest egg saved up to help you.

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        Or he was just depressed having lost his successful creation and by impulse started to risk his own life and this happened and it may not have been planned or rationalized at all.

        • Are you implying that an upset 18 year old with a friggin' McLaren may have failed to think through the repercussions of his actions?
          I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Committing suicide is one thing, but in do it in such a manner that you take other innocent lives with you, is fucking horribly twisted. Almost makes me wish that a Hell really does exist.

      Yet it happens - pilots crashing planes deliberately is another one that routinely shocks people. The recent Horizon Air "hijack" was notable in that it was only the guy on board - usually there are other innocent passengers just expecting to begin a nice vacation or looking forward to coming home to family and not be a pa

  • by Galactic Dominator ( 944134 ) on Saturday August 25, 2018 @06:16AM (#57191270)

    For the life of me, I cannot wrap my head around the vanity needed to be buying skins for a shooter game.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      I find it difficult to empathise with this one too. In the real world I get that people sometimes want to demonstrate excess wealth by wearing needlessly expensive clothes and trinkets in order to get laid, in much the same way peacocks grow feathers unneeded for survival. They demonstrate not only can they survive but also have enough resources left over to look more flamboyant. Similar again to birds that sing for long periods of time with the females watching to see how much energy they have left over
    • by jd ( 1658 )

      Money and glory are feishized. Sometimes, fetishes are lethal.

  • What was it? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Saturday August 25, 2018 @06:34AM (#57191334)
    I guess he taught us a lesson. What was it?
    • by aliquis ( 678370 )

      That liberty is good and restrictions are bad.

      As long as you don't rob people of their skins with the gambling sites just let people gamble with their (actual terms may not say it's "their" skins) skins if they want to.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Seems like he had mental health issues, probably relating to the ban and loss of income. Given his wealth it seems unlikely that he couldn't afford metal healthcare.

      So why didn't he seek out help? We can only speculate but it's often the stigma attached to mental health issues, especially for men.

      We could also ask if maybe YouTube and Twitch could offer more support. At the very least require 18 year olds making that kind of money on their services to have a proper manager and maybe offer them a mentor.

      • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        Sure. Because Google assigning managers that take a 10% cut couldn't possibly be a conflict of interest.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        What's really sad is that we used to be able to at least talk about this stuff on Slashdot. Now it gets modded down.

    • I guess he taught us a lesson. What was it?

      Get your depression (whether freestanding or part of bipolar) treated.

      Everyone has setbacks, often severe ones. But healthy people do not respond to them by harming themselves and others.

      • Sure, it's easy to think that evil is a mere matter of mental health--and I agree that plenty of bad things are the result of people either not seeking or not having the means to acquire proper treatment. But the fact is that healthy people are still able to make decisions, and many of our decisions selfishly build up ourselves at the expense of others. Being healthy does not cause us to choose morally good or helpful activities all of the time.

        No one of us can say for sure whether this particular case was

        • Sure, it's easy to think that evil is a mere matter of mental health--and I agree that plenty of bad things are the result of people either not seeking or not having the means to acquire proper treatment. But the fact is that healthy people are still able to make decisions, and many of our decisions selfishly build up ourselves at the expense of others. Being healthy does not cause us to choose morally good or helpful activities all of the time.

          No one of us can say for sure whether this particular case was a matter of mental illness or not, but we shouldn't assume from the start that simply because he did something harmful that he was not free in doing so. If we are not free to do evil, then how can we pretend to be free to do anything good? If we don't hold ourselves responsible for our bad decisions, how can we claim any merit for our good ones? Or to put it in another manner: how can we be sure that our good actions are not also the byproduct of mental health issues?

          Well, I'm not his doctor, so of course I can't be sure. I'm just spouting off on /.

          Had he responded to his setbacks by becoming, say, a bank robber, I'd more more inclined towards your take on it though.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        It wouldn't necessarily be depression. Teenage brains are not fully developed. Take one drowning in testosterone, add too much money, and presto: instant dangerous person.

    • That cars kill, and should be banned.
    • this should be held up as an example of success where a large company finally mostly protects their/your data and honestly reports details quickly.

      That there are better ways to train for Grand Theft Auto.

  • Headline (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday August 25, 2018 @06:37AM (#57191354) Homepage

    "Kills"? Try the word "murders". Killing people in a car crash can be accidental. This guy murdered two innocent people.

    • by jd ( 1658 )

      I, personally, agree but in American law there has to be an intent to kill. Merely killing with a full knowledge that that's the outcome but with no actual intent tends to be considered manslaughter or accidental.

      • The legal idea that committing a felony that risks others and thus constitutes murder is called "felony murder". As best I can tell, every state acknowledges felony murder as equivalent to the most deliberate and most punishable forms of deliberate murder.

        • by Etcetera ( 14711 )

          The legal idea that committing a felony that risks others and thus constitutes murder is called "felony murder". As best I can tell, every state acknowledges felony murder as equivalent to the most deliberate and most punishable forms of deliberate murder.

          Correct. However neither going over 100 nor reckless driving are felonies in California, so "felony murder" doesn't count here. In California, vehicular manslaughter is its own thing, and it in and of itself can be either charged as a felony or a misdemeanor, depending on if the defendant was negligent or "grossly negligent". Vehicular manslaughter can separately be upgraded to murder (usually in the second degree) if there was what CA calls "implied malice". This is a bit vague, but:

          “Implied malice c

          • California allows for extreme aggressive driving to be charged as felony assault with a deadly weapon. It's hard to see how driving 100 the wrong way and killing two people wouldn't qualify.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 )
      That requires proving intent and a certain amount of premeditation on his part. If he left some kind of angry online screed outlining that this was his intent all along, sure call him a murderer. Otherwise he may have just been out of his mind and not intending to kill himself or anyone else. The summary indicates that he's still a teenager, so I would be more likely to believe that he just lacked the ability to control his emotions and got swept up in it.

      If he somehow managed to live and had to face tri
  • Money is a status symbol. It's a surrogate for having any kind of sense. If he wasn't capable of earning millions - if total earnings are capped per unit time, along with total wealth, as per Plato's suggestion, he wouldn't have become addicted.

    Nobody becomes suicidal overnight. If instead of holding to some outmoded macho image that was out of style in the 60s and an insurance system that makes mental healthcare highly profitable by doing little and charging a lot, there was a system in place that correcte

  • This looks like an extended suicide "I I'll go out with a flash and a bang" type thing.
    Any reasons for that? Was his star dwindling? Did he have other troubles?

  • He clearly was suffering from some sort of mental illness that made him strive for being a "god" in that particular video game and not care about anything else. Once that status was taken away from him, his life was basically over, not worth living and boom, he ended it with such rage and fury. He should have had the decency of avoiding taking innocent lives with him but again, he didn't care about that, only that his life mattered.


    Mental health is no joke, stop pretending it is.
  • Middle-aged Video Poker Star Dies, Kills 58 In Bullet-ridden Gun-misfiring Hotel Incident

    WTF, Slashdot? Murder-suicide is now just some sort of gaming side-effect that needs to be listed on the label?

  • They should restrict the sale and licensing of full sized automobiles* to those 21 and over. Bring in Kei cars for the teenagers.

    *And no full auto either.

  • And his assets? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sunking2 ( 521698 ) on Saturday August 25, 2018 @10:54AM (#57192214)

    Every penny of what he had should be given/sold to the family so they don't need a gofundme to pay for the funeral/reparations.

  • Why would STEAM on the front of his car be "in reference to a magnet program which supports science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics" and not to Valve's Steam platform that banned him?

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