Unstable Minds, Viciously Oblivious Tantrums

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"When a person drives a 2,000-pound-plus motor vehicle intentionally onto a sidewalk, killing and injuring scores of people, that's murder."
Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson

"Why? Why us? Why did this happen?"
"Why did this girl injure a lot of people? She won't be able to feel the pain that she gave to a lot of people."
Anthony Hamel, 21, injured witness

"At first, I thought it was a movie shoot [blocked-off vehicular homicide scene on Las Vegas Strip]. I thought maybe we'd see someone famous."
Joel Ortega, 31

Instead, Mr. Ortega and his wife Carla, visiting Las Vegas from Redlands, California, got to see someone infamous in the next day's feature news items across the United States as photographs of Lakeisha Holloway were placed alongside stories about the completely disaffected woman of 24 who with malice aforethought and little concern over what her pique with her life trajectory had taken was translated into a horror scene of blood and tears.

One woman, out on the strip with her husband, visiting the casino city, will not return to her home other than in a casket, her husband left to wonder what impelled them to take that trip rather than remain safely at home. Video footage from the scene more than amply shows the car driven by this 24-year-old mounting the sidewalk, "aiming for the pedestrians in an intentional act".

And then repeating the performance, once, twice, three times for good measure. That good measure succeeded in transforming peoples' lives forever, since those witnessing the carnage spoke of bodies propelled into the air in that random act of brutish destruction. The witnesses will be forever haunted by the sight of pinballs that were really human beings, and the 37 people who were in the line of the woman's assault will recall their injuries and what caused them for the rest of their lives.

On Tuesday, Lakeisha Holloway -- whom family members insist was loved, employed by the U.S. Forestry Service, and not homeless -- was formally charged with murder with a deadly weapon, with one count of leaving the scene of an accident, both felony charges. A third criminal charge, of child abuse, neglect or endangerment, in connection with her three-year-old child's presence in the car has also been laid.

"The car rolled right in front of me. By the time I looked over to the right, all you could see was (her) driving away, and people were bouncing off the front of the car. She rode the sidewalk, she came to a stop at the (Paris Las Vegas Hotel) intersection, people are punching into the window. ... She accelerated again and just kept mowing people down", witness Antonio Nasser said, describing the scene of mayhem.

"Boy, have I come a long ways. I was a scared little girl who knew that there was more to life outside of crime, drug addiction, lower income, alcoholism, being undereducated -- all of which I grew up being familiar with. Today, I am not the same scared girl I used to be," she proudly declared in a 2012 video when she had won a C.A.R.E. Role Model Award. 

"I'm a mature young woman who has broken many generational cycle(s) that those before me hadn't." This was when she had successfully completed her second chance at a high school diploma, and emerged as a 'changed person' with the aid of the Portland Opportunities Industrializations Center in Oregon whose function is to aid at-risk youth with education and career-training.