Social Suicide Paparazzi Style

At 11:00 p.m. last night I flipped to the local news, looking for word on the economic stimulus package. However, the local ABC station was otherwise occupied, broadcasting a slow-speed police pursuit of a luxury vehicle. While the station still knew little, more than three hours into the chase, the speculative newscasters continued to babble for thirty uninterpreted minutes before ceding their coverage of the confrontation to the "hard news" coverage of Nightline (including an expose on the now infamous "Octomom").

Turns out, the car chase that began nearly three hours earlier had turned into a parked standoff by 11:30 p.m. The situation took a turn for the worst, so to speak, nearly an hour and a half after the chase came to a halt in Universal City, not far from where it began. The driver, who police believed armed and suicidal, shot himself in the head as LAPD officers and California Highway Patrol officers surrounded his $170,000 Bentley sedan.

L.A. is accustomed to televised police pursuits, even of the slow-speed variety made famous by O.J. Simpson in 1994. The Monday night chase marks the fifth police pursuit in the L.A. area that has transpired in the last two weeks. What makes this one stand out was less its crawling pace, than the new breed of celebrity obsessed paparazzi that were on the scene within minutes of the driver, a Pakistani business man, slowing his vehicle to a halt.

The smell of money, fame and the possibility of a blood drenched celeb drew the swarm of paparazzi from their usual posts near the entrances of hot Hollywood clubs and celebrity infused restaurants. The pack of photogs and the live feeds to the scene they provided complicated the situation for officers. But, alas, although the driver took his own life less than 25 yards of the zoom lenses, no site boasts footage of the blast or, for that matter, the police storming the car and bashing out the driver's side window with a crowbar.

Maybe some moments still remain sacred, even among paparazzi.