Driver in crash had been shooed from parking lots

LAS VEGAS - A homeless woman accused of slamming a car carrying her 3-year-old daughter into a crowd of pedestrians on the Las Vegas Strip was stressed out after being chased by security guards from parking lots where she had been trying to sleep before the crash, authorities said Monday.

Lakeisha N. Holloway, 24, resided in Oregon and had been in Las Vegas for about a week in her 1996 Oldsmobile sedan, parking it at garages throughout the city, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said.

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."

Investigators said Holloway had run out of money and she and her daughter had been living in the car. Police believe she was headed to Dallas to find her daughter's father after they had a falling out.

Holloway is accused of intentionally mowing down people on a busy stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard, killing a woman from Arizona and injuring dozens of others on Sunday night.

After the crash, she parked at a casino a few blocks away, told a parking attendant that she had run down people and asked the valet to call 911, 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. He declined to elaborate on what she said.

"She didn't appear to be distressed due to her actions. That's the best way I can describe it," Lombardo said.

Authorities declined to comment on a potential motive and said they were struggling to piece together Holloway's background.

She had changed her name to Paris Paradise Morton in October, according to Oregon court records.

Several years ago, Holloway, a graduate of an alternative high school, received an award for overcoming adversity from the nonprofit Portland Opportunities Industrial Center.

In 2012, she told the Skanner, a newspaper that covers Portland's African American community, that she was homeless during her freshman year in high school.

Holloway's cousin, Lashay Hardaway, told the Oregonian that Holloway worked hard to provide for her daughter.

The crash happened in front of the Paris and Planet Hollywood casino-hotels.