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

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."

Comments

Suicide

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Solandri]

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. 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.

I guess I'll never have a McLaren

[Galactic Dominator]

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

Re:I guess I'll never have a McLaren

[SqueakyMouse]

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 to keep singing before the females choose their mate. This is a computer game however. Who gets laid this way? You can only impress your like-minded competitors in a game that is blatantly taking advantage of irrational vanity and turning it into a revenue stream. The more rational players presumably stay quiet and think, "Thanks for subsidising my game", removing some of the peer pressure for them to keep their wallets shut.

Re:Testosterone

[quantaman]

I have been wondering why driving licenses are given to persons with high testosterone level?
Why not ban driving if your testosterone level is above certain safe threshold?

This has nothing to do with unsafe driving, it was a guy committing suicide in a way that killed two other people in the process.

What was it?

[AndyKron]

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

Headline

[Rei]

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

Re:Seat belts?

[Anonymous Coward]

The seatbelt thing is meant to describe the level of carnage that this hormone-filled douche bag inflicted on innocent bystanders due to his inability to control his emotions. He torched a little girl and his mother so bad the police could barely figure out who he murdered. It has nothing to do with safety. Obviously everyone will be dead in a 100mph head-on collision. I hope he burns in hell.

Excessive cars.

[jd]

If mass transit was commonplace, convenient and cheap and if there wasn't so much hostility to talking, then you could seriously restrict driving and pedestrianise large areas without inconveniencing anyone.

That might have meant the girl was on a bus, tram or train rather than vulnerable car.

That might also have meant the lunatic wasn't able to buy a car or didn't want one as it wasn't a status symbol.

Re: Testosterone

[Anonymous Coward]

How's it sexist? Women also have testosterone, just as men also have oestrogen.

People with less melanin commit fewer crimes, therefore people with high melanin should be placed in jail by default. Totally not racist tho.

--This guy

Re:So, a young man ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you do realize that the trigger event from Valve was demonetizing skin gambling. They prohibited the gambling due to bad actors, and some guy that makes his living from gambling runs his car into some innocent people. Valve taking away someone's illegitimate revenue stream does not make them complicit in his desire to murder people on the highway. He is responsible for his own actions.

Re:Money, Mental healthcare, community policing

[Mal-2]

There is no system that "corrects issues early, quickly, cheaply and effectively". Even if mental health services were socialized (which they should be, really, because untreated mental illness affects us all), it would still be neither quick nor necessarily effective.

Re:Seat belts?

[markdavis]

>"This event also makes driving laws in some other countries (Australia is the first that comes to mind) look better than our own. They restrict the use of high-powered vehicles until the driver has a certain amount of driving experience -- five years, if I remember right."

Different (objective), not better (generally subjective).

In any case- ANY modern car can go 100 MPH, the estimated speed of this accident. In many places in the USA, the highest speed limit is 80 (and 85 in a few tiny spots), with people reasonably going 5 over. You don't need a "performance" [high-powered] vehicle to do that.

Now, most would admit that "performance" vehicles may further coax certain [already reckless-leaning] people to do reckless things.

Let Me Help You With That, Editors....

[moehoward]

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?

Oh bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Brains still growing isn't an excuse for immaturity. Society did just fine when most people got married between 14-16. This extra decade of acting like a child is probably the problem, and extending the immaturity will make it worse.

And his assets?

[sunking2]

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.

Re: Seat belts?

[belthize]

I've heard this stupid mantra for 40+ years. The chances of you being in an accident where, seatbelt = burned alive and no seat belt = instant death, is very close to zero.

The other common argument is no seatbelt = instant death is better than seatbelt = vegetable. Which is fine except the set of car accidents where no seat belt = vegetable and seatbelt = perfectly fine is much much larger.

In short if you want to avoid horrible death or long term disability then wear a fucking seatbelt, or don't reproduce because you're mucking up the gene pool

Re: Seat belts?

[wwalker]

Not this crap again. Didn't they bust this myth on Mythbusters too? It doesn't matter what you hit, a wall or another object travelling at an arbitrary speed in arbitrary direction. All that matters is delta V. If you were travelling at 50 mph and then as the result of collision ended up travelling 0 mph -- it absolutely doesn't matter what was the object that you hit, a wall, or another car with similar mass head on -- the kinetic energy that you need to dissipate is exactly the same. Yeah, there are nuances about crumple zones and unlike the wall, you hardly every stop at exactly 0 mph with head on collision, but that's minor details.

It's a different story if you hit a truck with a much larger mass, and the truck continues on its path with slightly reduced speed (i.e. it plows through your car). Then yeah, it's much worse, because you get some of the truck's kinetic energy. On the other hand, if you hit a bike head on, you win hands down. But assuming both cars involved in a head-on collision are about the same mass (and ignoring crumple zones and any residual speed you might have), it will be exactly the same as hitting a wall.

Re: Seat belts?

[KiloByte]

All that matters is delta V.

Energy-wise yeah, but the damage is drastically different depending on the distance that energy has been dissipated over:
* if you hit a solid wall, the distance is 0 (plus your car's internal crumple zones)
* if you hit a similar car coming head-on with the same speed, the distance is 0 (plus your own car's (only) internal crumple zones)
* if you hit a parked car with handbrake off, you may move it several meters before coming to a halt

Same difference as falling onto hard floor vs falling onto a pillow, from the same height.

But, as you can notice, the dissipation distance for solid wall vs head-on collision is identical.

Re: Seat belts?

[Kjella]

A head on by two cars travelling at 50MPH is definitely worse than a single car hitting a solid immovable wall at 50MPH.

No. Your car will deform on your side, their car will deform on their side and the net effect is the same as hitting an immovable wall. Now between two equal cars the damage scales with the relative speed difference, regardless of distribution. Like 50+50 and 100+0 ends up the same, it's still two crumple zones meeting at 100 mph. If you have unequal weights the heavier vehicle will maintain some momentum and thus have less deceleration, which is quite obvious if you consider car vs motorcycle. Though what happens to the passengers depends on the car, there's some very complex systems to soften the impact of the deceleration. If you connected a solid steel rod from the front of the car to the car seat people would die real quick.