Crash suspect had overcome earlier adversity
LAS VEGAS — It wasn’t long ago that the woman arrested in the deadly Las Vegas Strip sidewalk crash seemed to be doing well for herself.
After a rough childhood that included a period of homelessness in high school Lakeisha Holloway had become an award-winning high school graduate and caring mother.
That recent picture of success deepens the mystery of how the former Oregon woman wound up in a Las Vegas jail and on suicide watch. The 24-year-old Holloway faces murder charges after authorities said she plowed her Oldsmobile down a sidewalk of tourists Sunday night, killing one person and injuring three dozen others while her 3-year-old daughter sat in the back seat of the careening car.
After reviewing video surveillance footage, police said they believe Holloway drove up on the sidewalk deliberately.
They say she was homeless, and out of money, sleeping in her car in parking garages. She might have been on her way to Texas to meet with the father of her daughter after the pair had split up some time ago.
After her arrest, Holloway “described a stressful period today where she was trying to rest/sleep inside her vehicle with her daughter but kept getting run off by security of the properties she stopped at,” a police report states.
“She ended up on the Strip, ‘a place she did not want to be,”’ the report quoted her as saying. “She would not explain why she drove onto the sidewalk but remembered a body bouncing off her windshield, breaking it.”
She parked at a casino a few blocks away from the crash site, told a parking attendant that she had run down people and asked the valet to call 911, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said. Her daughter, who was in the backseat, was not hurt.
The sheriff said Holloway was stoic when police arrived, showed no resistance and spoke coherently about what happened.
Authorities declined to comment on a potential motive and said they were struggling to piece together Holloway’s background.
