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

Seat belts?

[Mal-2]

I understand the point was to highlight the aftermath of the crash, but seat belts aren't going to save you if someone comes at you head-on at 100 MPH. Also, I know the CHP and the state in general have a vested interest in promoting the use of seat belts. Still, this is a very strange time to discuss them.

Re:Seat belts?

[drinkypoo]

F1 drivers also have safety cages. That's all great for protecting one person, but most of us have cars that can carry more than just a driver.

Other types of drivers have safety cages too, even when they race in vehicles that can hold more than one person. A WRC car can roll, tumble, and cartwheel multiple times before hitting a tree and the driver and co-driver can both get out and walk away in many cases. It's well past time to ask why race cars have to be safe in high-speed collisions, but street cars don't.

Re: Seat belts?

[ChatHuant]

Two cars colliding frontal with 50 mph each, is equivalent to one car hitting a standing car (wall) with 100mph.

It seems intuitive, but it's not true, because kinetic energy is not proportional to the speed, but to the speed squared. For simplification let's assume the vast majority of the cars' kinetic energy before the collision ends up in the deformation of the crumple zones, and compare the energies in the two cases. In both cases, the kinetic energy after the collision is 0, so by computing the kinetic energy before the collision we can find out how much the crumple zones have absorbed.

In the car-car scenario, the total energy of the system before the collision is the sum of the kinetic energy of the two cars (each at 50 mph). Because they're identical, each car absorbs half of this, so each car has to absorb m * (50mph)^2 /2.

In the car-wall scenario the total energy in the system is m* (100mph)^2/2; that's four times the energy of the single car at 50 mph - because the factor of two in the speed gets squared. Moreover, all this energy is absorbed by a single car (because the wall is immovable), not split between both cars. In the end, the car-wall collision pumps four times more energy in the car's crumple zones than the car-car scenario, which makes it much worse.

So, a young man ...

[Rip!ey]

... who crafted an online identity for himself, had it cut off by the State and the company Valve. And he didn't handle it well. And now people are dead.

Go ahead and blame the guy by all means, but this is a mental health issue. In particular, this is a mental health issue that all of society is to blame for. In particular the state, and the company that profits from the skin gambling, Valve.

Sure. Nobody should be a dick like that. But neither should Valve, nor the State, nor the rest of society. Society created this monster. Society and the profit greed of companies and politicians.