The crash made news in Columbus back in June, especially since the Canzani name was so well known in the city (the Columbus College of Art & Design named its primary exhibition space downtown the Canzani Center Gallery) and also because Cordle’s grandfather co-founded Cord Camera, a chain of camera shops in and around Ohio since 1954. The video brought the incident to a global audience. Cordle’s face was on every news outlet imaginable. Sarah remembers her father’s phone ringing constantly on Friday, Sept. 6. Cutthroat morning shows wanted exclusives. Media began referring to him as the “YouTube confessor.”

The video’s shock factor (“I killed a man”), professional production (good lighting and editing, emotional music), and storytelling (building drama by obfuscating then revealing Cordle’s identity) all contributed to its appeal. But another aspect is Cordle’s averageness. He doesn’t come across like an actor. He’s focused, though not particularly poised. He seems like a regular, middle-class kid with whom millions of YouTube viewers could identify. Before the crash, Cordle’s sister Grace says she thought of him as “just a normal teenage kid. The problem is, he’s not a teenager anymore.” Chances are you know more than a few people like that — the man-child who never quite left his teenage years behind, going from job to job and partying hard on the weekends. The driven types could relate to him too; self-medicating a quarter-life crisis with massive amounts of alcohol is what a lot of middle-class kids call “college.” And the unfortunate reality is that most everyone knows someone who has driven or continues to drive after excessive drinking, especially in the twenty- and thirtysomething demographic.

As the video spread, Cordle’s family was furious. And embarrassed. He hadn’t told any of them about it, though his father had walked in while he and Sheen were filming at the river house. (Cordle told him it was going to be a public service announcement.) His oldest sister Sarah — the mother figure of the Cordle siblings — suspected her brother had something in the works but hadn’t known what. The ensuing family meetings weren’t pretty.

“I was pretty volatile with them,” Cordle says. “They came at me all angry, and I responded the same way.” Cordle told them the purpose of the video — the message he and Sheen wanted to spread — was bigger than them. It was more important than his own family. Cordle also knew that had he told them, they would have done everything in their power to stop him. “He was right,” Sarah says. “We would have tried to stop him. I might have threatened him a little bit, like, ‘Think about grandma and grandpa!’” They lashed out at Sheen too. “He’s already remorseful,” they said. “What more do you want from him?”

Media reports began questioning Cordle’s motives since he knew he was being investigated when he made the video. Some saw it as an attempt to turn tragedy into internet fame. “Matthew Cordle is part of a generation that values fame like no previous generation has,” one digital-media blogger wrote, worrying that this might be the beginning of a new trend in viral crime confession. “Today, the only thing standing between any one of us and instant celebrity is our ability to create a message with resonance. Cordle may view the death he caused as a personal opportunity, the mother of all Facebook timeline life events.” Other reports were inaccurate, referring to the crash as a “hit and run.” (One look at a photo of the wreckage from the crash site reveals the stupidity of such a claim.) Perhaps the most widely circulated criticism came from a local TV news interview with Angela Canzani, Vincent’s daughter. “This whole thing has made the death of my father fresh,” she said. “I feel like he died all over again. And all I keep hearing about is the message. And what people seem to forget is that a person is dead.”

It’s true the video was not solely for the message and Canzani. It was for Cordle’s benefit, too, at least mentally and emotionally. The video didn’t alleviate the guilt of taking another man’s life, but admitting his guilt in a public way enabled Cordle to grapple with and accept it. This was something active when everything since the crash had been suffocatingly passive.

Sheen says he spoke to Angela on the phone after the video was released, explaining the message and the purpose and assuring her “this is not the Matthew Cordle show.” “I value because I said I would over everything — over my family relationships, perhaps even over my own life,” he said. “I’m not going to let someone take a message that has helped people and destroy it. Nor will I use it to help someone get a lighter sentence.” Because I said I would also made a $5,000 donation to Mothers Against Drunk Driving in honor of Vincent Canzani. “I thought she was comfortable with it, more or less,” Sheen says, noting Angela, who did not respond to an interview request for this story, was harsher in the media than she was with him.

Complicating matters is the fact that, according to Canzani’s third ex-wife, Cheryl Oates, and the longtime friends he was living with before he died, Butch and Janice Thompson, Angela and sister Maria Brooks had little to no relationship with their father. Angela was raised by Vince’s second wife, and Maria was raised by her grandparents, Canzani’s mother and father. A friend from the Tinder Box said one of the daughters reached out to Canzani on Facebook a few weeks before the crash and believed it was the first time he had heard from her in eight years.

Yet any and all Canzani family issues and perceived motives are inconsequential to Cordle and Sheen, both of whom are quick to say that Angela and Maria are justified in feeling however they feel. If indeed they were estranged from their father, Cordle took away the chance of reconciliation in the future. Cordle also concedes the video put his own name and face in a brighter spotlight than the man he killed. “In order to make that impact,” he says, “I think it was a necessary evil that the spotlight be on me because it’s the story I’m involved in. I never wanted to have the spotlight on me, but to do something, it kind of had to be on me.”

“People have criticized the production value of it, like, ‘Why didn’t he just turn himself in?’ ‘Why didn’t he just do a webcam?’” Sheen says. “I understand it. But at the same time, is the message against drinking and driving not worth eight hours of production? When you say the music is too emotional, is not the loss of Vincent Canzani more emotional than any music can be? I think that with this type of message, yes, it’s worth your attention and emotion. I’ll go to great lengths to make sure you understand. I won’t sensationalize it in a way that’s not accurate. But everything in that video is accurate. [Lawyers] said he could maybe get off. They said he could get a reduced sentence. This is what lawyers say. Nothing was misleading in that fashion.”

In hindsight they both might change some wording here and there, but neither has any major regrets. They made the video in a living room in Ohio and it has been viewed millions of times all over the world and translated into Spanish. Cordle and his family have boxes of letters and countless emails of support. Images of promise cards with variations of “I will not drink and drive” have poured into Sheen’s inbox. They’re convinced the video has saved at least one life, and likely many more.