On Halloween in 2006 18-year-old Nicole Catsouras of Orange County, CA, was killed in a gruesome car accident. If that weren’t awful enough, photographs from the accident scene ended up all over the Internet, thanks to a couple of highway patrol dispatchers who decided to leak them.

On the night of her death, Nicole Catsouras took her father’s Porsche without permission and was driving at dangerously high speeds. She hit another vehicle then crashed into a toll booth. The damage was so extensive that the Catsouras family was not allowed to view Nicole’s body following the accident. Soon after photos began to appear online.

I hate to pick on the Portland Police again, but I can’t really help it this time. At least this story isn’t about another Portland Police officer with a DUI. No, this is about paying Portland Police officers a “health and fitness premium” for taking a biometric screening. Basically, officers got paid an additional $739 for the screening, which consisted of having their blood pressure, height, and weight checked and getting their fingers pricked for blood. That’s it. They did not have to take any sort of physical fitness test.

This is a bit of a baffling story. The 3-year-old son of Ed Owens accidentally killed himself after he accessed a weapon from a defective gun safe in the home. At the time of the shooting in September of 2010, Owens was a sheriff’s deputy for Clark County. Owens claimed he was not aware the safe was faulty.

Owens was fired not long after the shooting for a number of reasons, including his failure to fix the supposedly faulty gun safe. To complicate matters, an investigation into the matter found that Owens placed the blame for the accident on his 11-year-old stepdaughter and made her say she was supposed to be watching the toddler but fell asleep.

Random drug testing of Portland Police officers is scheduled to begin this year, but the Portland Police Association (the union) is up in arms about it. Why? Because the random drug testing will include testing for steroids.

Plenty of other police forces around the country include steroids in their random drug testing, but the local union is against it and has even filed a grievance against the City of Portland to try to stop the drug testing.

Yvonne Deckard, director of Portland’s Bureau of Human Resources, says the union delayed negotiations, and finally, at the end of December, Deckard notified the union the city would proceed with random drug testing in 2012.

We blogged recently about how a Multnomah County grand jury decided there was enough evidence to indict Portland Police officer Dane Reister for third- and fourth-degree assault. Reister is the officer who mistakenly loaded live shotgun rounds instead of beanbags then shot and injured William Kyle Monroe.

Reister’s trial will begin on February 1. He was arraigned on December 13, 2011, and plead not guilty. Reister has been on paid leave since the shooting on June 30. He has been wiht the Portland Police for fifteen years. The Portland Police Association has voiced its support of Reister and issued a statement disagreeing with the indictment.

A 73-year-old man died while traveling on American Airlines, and his family blames the airlines and the chicken he ate on board. The family has filed a lawsuit against American Airlines and Sky Chefs, whom they claim provided the in-flight food.

The 73-year-old, Othon Cortes, was flying from Spain to New York and then on to his home in Miami. He ingested the in-flight meal on the flight from Barcelona to New York and soon was plagued by stomach pain and nausea. He continued to feel ill on board the flight from New York to Miami, and the plane had to make an unscheduled landing in Norfolk, Virginia, to tend to his medical needs. Cortes died shortly after landing.

Oh, TriMet, here we go again. So, you probably all know about the bus driver who forced a woman and her infant off of her bus because the baby wouldn’t stop crying and was driving the driver to distraction. It turns out this is not the first time the driver has ousted passengers or otherwise treated them poorly. In fact, in the past two years, the driver, Claudeen Hendren, has been slapped with some 112 complaints. Most TriMet drivers average about 6 complaints per year.

Remember the Portland Police officer who accidentally loaded live shotgun rounds into his beanbag shotgun then shot a man several times? It happened in SW Portland this last summer. Well, a Multnomah County grand jury decided Dane Reister should be held accountable for his mistakes. After hearing testimony from dozens of witnesses, the grand jury voted to indict Reister on third-degree assault, which is a felony, and fourth-degree assault, a misdemeanor. Reister will also be charged with “negligent wounding,” which is typically only used in hunting cases.

A Chicago man recently filed a lawsuit against the Chicago police, claiming he was wrongfully identified and tased unnecessarily. Josue Tapia was pulled over by police in May of 2010 for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign, but he was allowed to go soon aftewards. He didn’t make it very far, however, before he was stopped by police again. The police claimed Tapia had violated other traffic laws then, according to Tapia, they pushed him to the ground and tased him nearly a dozen times in less than 5 minutes. Tapia claims the attack was unprovoked.

Toy manufacturer Henry Gordy International, Inc. has agreed to pay a $1.1 million penalty in an agreement with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) over a toy gun set that allegedly caused several deaths. An investigation by the CPSC found that Henry Gordy knew about the defect in its “Auto Fire Target Set” but chose not to report it. The gun set, which sold in Family Dollar Stores across the nation from 2005 to early 2009 for about $1.50 a set, included a toy gun, soft plastic darts, and a target. The darts were found to be choking hazards.