The Real Story of Collette Moreno's Viral "Selfie Death"
Collette Moreno was on the way to her own bachelorette party, and she was choking. The truck in front of her and her best friend, Ashley Theobald, was spewing fumes that were aggravating Moreno's asthma, but Missouri Highway 5 had a double yellow line; they couldn't pass. Her friend tearing up, Theobald craned her head to the left. The coast looked clear. She tilted the wheel, guiding the Chevy Malibu across the lines, speeding up to make the pass quick. But as the Malibu sped forward, a Dodge Ram came cruising up a slight hill that neither of them had seen. Theobald swerved, but the Dodge swerved with them. The cars collided head-on.
On June 20, 2014, 26-year-old Collette Moreno died five weeks before her wedding, leaving her 5-year-old son motherless. But that, according to the internet, wasn't the worst thing that happened that day: eight minutes before the fumes and the double yellow lines, Moreno took a selfie - grinning from the passenger seat, with Theobald in the background driving in shiny heart-shaped sunglasses.
"Dying in a car crash...but first, LEMME TAKE A SELFIE!," an anonymous commenter wrote on a Daily Mail article about Moreno's death. "thats natural selection - idiots die," wrote another on a YouTube compilation video about selfie deaths featuring Collette, and, "With great selfies must also come great stupidity," commented a third.
"We were just beginning to learn about everything ourselves," Moreno's sister Samantha says over the phone. "It was just completely overwhelming and heartbreaking that people that didn't even know the situation were saying things."
Within a year of Moreno's death, the internet's selfie-death obsession peaked. While the Oxford Dictionary and Twitter named 2013 and 2014 respectively as the "year of the selfie," The Guardian called 2015 the year of the "dangerous selfie." The world had started seeing selfies not as a novelty, but rather caught squarely in the crosshairs of the cruel repercussions of a narcissistic culture. The names of people that accumulated on the Wikipedia page for "List of selfie-related injuries and deaths" became punching bags. To critics, the deaths validate what they want to believe about millennials: that they are self-absorbed, and self-absorption is an odious quality with odious consequences. Never mind that hardly any of these peoples' deaths were confirmed to be caused by a selfie.
Moreno's photo, for example, had absolutely nothing to do with her death. But that didn't matter to the internet.
Collette Moreno was born on June 9, 1988, in San Diego, California, the eldest sibling to sister Erica and half-sisters Samantha and Breeanna. Like most modern 26-year-olds, she was hooked on social media - her Twitter bio still reads, "I'm addicted to social networking. #whyy?" She lived in Missouri, but with a lot of her family in San Diego she stayed in touch by sending them silly videos and photos online.
But Moreno had to grow up fast. "She met a boy in high school, it was her ninth grade," says Moreno's mother, Kelly Arie. "She graduated, and then the next thing I knew I was going to be a grandma." Moreno's son, Brayden, was born on September 27, 2008. Her love for him shows in her Facebook posts. In September 2009, Moreno lamented about how she wished she could make things better for Brayden, writing, "If i was in a dream world i wouldnt i wouldnt have to worry about how i am going to care take of my son and give him the best life possible." Another post reads, "I wish i didnt have to be at work today. I would love to lay around and cuddle brayden all day long!"
Moreno's relationship with Brayden's father fell apart, and while she was happy as a single mom, she hoped one day to fall in love again. A few years later, she met Jesse Arcobasso at a party, and they started dating. He was 25, she was 23, and the young couple was goofy and carefree. They dressed up as Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas one year for Halloween, and sent each other Snapchats of the weirdest faces they could make. Arcobasso tweeted in 2012: "u kno u r in a committed relationship when u get a call from ur girl at 946pm asking u to buy her tampons.#neveragain @ColletteMarie88." (Arcobasso did not respond to requests for an interview.)
After three years together, Arcobasso and Moreno stopped by a mall caricature artist, who drew a cartoonish Arcobasso holding a diamond ring and asking, "Will you marry me?" They set the date - July 26, 2014 - and decided to marry in Jamaica. Over the course of the next year, Moreno's Facebook feed slowly filled up with engagement photos, silly and sweet, and shots of the family-to-be: Brayden jumps on the couple's backs in their living room. Arcobasso gives Brayden a boost to put the star on top of the Christmas tree. Moreno leaps into Arcobasso's arms in an open field.
Moreno never made it down the aisle.
After the crash, Theobald, a pretty brunette who looks like she could be Moreno's sister, told Fox News that Moreno didn't appear terribly injured. "I was talking to her. She couldn't talk back but she was nodding at me," Theobald says through tears in the news report. "I didn't know it was as bad as it was because she wasn't physically super beaten-up."
An ambulance took Moreno to the hospital, where she would die a few hours later from injuries sustained in the crash. According to Moreno's family, Theobald is no longer in touch with them, and she did not return interview requests for this article.
Moreno's family isn't sure how the selfie got out. It first appeared on the website of a local Kansas City news outlet, KCTV. DeAnn Smith, the writer of the first article to include the selfie, did not respond to a request to confirm how the selfie was obtained, and a representative for KCTV said, "That information is not available." But it became the photo every news site used to cover Moreno's death.
Most of the news coverage about Moreno stated at least in the body of the article that she had snapped the photo a full eight minutes before the crash, but many readers missed this from the headlines like, "Collette Moreno Killed En Route To Her Bachelorette Party Moments After Taking Selfie," and "Bride-to-be, 26, killed in head-on car crash as she and best friend drove to her bachelorette party moments after pair snapped this selfie." Unfortunately, 55 percent of readers spend fewer than 15 seconds actually reading an article, according to founding CEO of Chartbeat Tony Haile. "One thing many people seem to have forgotten as a simple rule is to not distract the driver while driving. Maybe had she not looked over for just a few moments to take that selfie, she could have seen the truck coming," one commenter wrote on a Huffington Post article about the subject. The author of the Huffington Post article said in an email that he didn't think his headline mentioning the selfie was misleading, adding that "I can say I would never want any victim to be criticized."
Moreno isn't the only one who has been wrongly lumped into the selfie-death craze. In September 2015, the family of Kristi Kafcaloudis, a student who fell to her death from a cliff in Norway, came forward to clear their daughter's name after a similar internet mob.
"It was an accident. She was nowhere near the end of the rock, and not taking a selfie," her mother Milli Kafcaloudis said in a statement received by ABC. Kristi had taken the selfie earlier on the hike, according to Milli, and later was trying to walk around other tourists to get a better view at a popular scenic hiking area when the rocks gave, causing her to lose her balance. But initial reports said that Kafcaloudis "lost her balance while taking a photo at the cliff's edge" and "was taking a so-called 'selfie' when she lost her balance and plunged to her death."
Data journalism site Priceonomics estimated in January that, of the 49 people who have reportedly died while taking a selfie since 2014, "not a single death was caused by the selfie itself."
The Guardian issued a correction about Kristi's cause of death a month after the article ran, and some other sites followed suit, but the damage was already done. "Sometime in the future I may reflect on it with a broader perspective," Milli Kafcaloudis says in an email, "but for the moment I am just dealing with day to day life and trying to find my own balance with family and friends."
Kelly Arie's partner Rosa says seeing Moreno on those "Viral Selfie Deaths" lists, like "Moments After Their Selfies Were Taken These People Were Dead," "Here Are 7 Selfies That Were Taken Moments Before Death," and "8 Selfies Taken Moments Before Death," was even worse than the inaccuracy - it trivialized Moreno's death into a viral joke. "Every media site that I would find would post those stupid ten-top-selfies-before-death [lists], I would email them to take it down. I kind of went on a rampage with all of those," Rosa says.
The comments on the lists were more vicious than on the news reports. "I tried to stay away from it," Samantha says. "'She's obsessed with herself,' or 'she's conceited.' 'She just likes to take pictures all of the time,' and it's not like that. Women take pictures of themselves for many different reasons."
The only way to know why people spam the comment sections of articles about selfie deaths is to ask the haters themselves. "Short answer, narcissistic [sic] idiots lacking in common sense causing themselves harm or removing themselves from the gene pool is natural selection in action," says Pete*, a Redditor who has criticized several selfie-related deaths on the site.
The death-by-selfie hysteria produces responses that are almost uniform to Pete's, with little regard for whether the selfie caused the death or not. A Polish couple reportedly plummets to their deaths while attempting to take a photo and a comment reads, "It was probably wrong of me to have laughed when I read this headline but I just couldn't help myself" (the headline was "Polish couple fall off cliff and die while taking selfies"); a young father accidentally shoots himself allegedly mid-photo and someone tweets, "Laugh or Cry? Either Way, a Candidate for a #DarwinAward"; a Japanese tourist falls off the Taj-Mahal supposedly while snapping a photo of himself and a commenter writes, "Should call them self-obsessdies. With emphasis on the 'dies' bit at the end."
Because selfies are a relatively new trend, research on the topic is slim. In a study of 800 men, researchers in Ohio found a link between these types of photos and narcissism, even psychopathy. A Polish study of 748 adults and a second with 548 adults showed that in women, selfie-posting correlated with a desire for admiration, while in men, selfie-posting correlated with vanity, an inflated sense of leadership abilities, and a desire for admiration.
Albright College Associate Professor of Psychology Gwendolyn Seidman, Ph.D., warns that these findings should be taken with a big grain of salt. "Part of the issue with the research on selfies," Seidman says over the phone, "is that among certain social groups, posting selfies might just be so common that it doesn't really tell you anything about the person, because everybody does it. It's more likely that it's some cultural trend and not all young people are suddenly insane."
There isn't enough research to determine why alleged selfie deaths receive so much more online vitriol than other events, but Phil Reed, a psychology professor at Swansea University in the UK, hypothesizes that the perceived narcissism in selfie culture might be triggering to none other than the self-absorbed themselves.
Reed says that a lot of trolling and cyber bullying comes from a combination of anonymity and what he calls "the dark triad of personality characteristics" - sadism, narcissism, and psychopathy - in the commenters. "The negative comments about selfie deaths come probably from narcissists," he says, "who see somebody else getting attention."
Arie refused to let the internet commenters who'd made her pain so much worse bully her into signing off. "I post pictures of my daughter every single day. That's my way of dealing with it," she tells me over the phone. She tries not to think about the selfie and the comments and instead focuses on drowning them out with new content about her daughter. Every few days for two years, Arie has posted about mundane things like shoveling snow (reflecting on how much Moreno hated it) and singing Adele in the car with Moreno's niece and the feelings of dysphoria and despondency that come with losing a loved one on the "In Loving Memory of Collette Marie Moreno" Facebook page. In one post, Arie writes:
But it's hard work to control your - or your daughter's - narrative on the internet. Some online companies offer to help, for a high price. One company, Reputation.com, offers a service called ReputationDefender that buries your negative search results for a fees from $3000 a year to over $25,000 a year depending on the workload. Another, BrandYourself, offers a package that includes personal branding and suppressing negative search results for $599.99 per month.
Operating the tribute page is the family's way of reclaiming the daughter and sister they knew. In July, along with a photo of Moreno's sister Erica wearing a T-shirt with Moreno's smile beaming from the front, Erica writes:
Brayden, who turns 8 this month and is living with his father's sister, doesn't know the vitriol he might find if he were to Google his mother's name. His grandmother says she's wary about letting him online for this reason. But when he's old enough to use the internet alone, Moreno's family wants to make sure Brayden doesn't see the nasty comments and instead sees the good they saw in their daughter and sister: a well-loved, caring, complex, three-dimensional woman.
After a two-year-long battle of love versus hate, the "In Loving Memory of Collette Marie Moreno" Facebook page is finally inching its way up on the first page of Collette Moreno's Google results. Samantha hopes the symbolism isn't lost on people who post nasty comments online - eventually, positivity will win out. "Treat others how you want to be treated," she says. "That's how everybody should be treated, not just my sister in particular, but everybody."
*name has been changed.
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