Vegas Massacre

[strandinthewind]

Car strikes pedestrians on Las Vegas Strip
One dead, 13 injured

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AP) -- A car plowed into pedestrians along the crowded Las Vegas Strip on Wednesday, killing one and injuring 13, authorities said. Police arrested the driver at the scene.

The car jumped the curb about 5:15 p.m. and drove into people walking in front of the Bally's and Paris hotel-casinos, officials said.

A 52-year-old man was pronounced dead at University Medical Center, a hospital spokeswoman said. Eight other people, all adults, were being treated at the hospital.

Five people were taken to Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, where one man was in critical condition and two others were listed as serious, hospital spokeswoman Glenda McCartney said.

After striking the pedestrians, the burgundy Buick crashed into a wall and came to a stop in a landscaped area in front of Bally's.

The car's driver, Stephen Ressa, 27, of Rialto, California, was arrested at the scene by an off-duty officer who was at a nearby restaurant, authorities said. It wasn't clear if he was injured, and results of drug and alcohol tests were pending.

Police spokesman Jose Montoya said authorities were investigating whether the car with California license plates was stolen. Ressa was being held in jail.

"We have not ruled out whether this was an intentional or unintentional act," Deputy Police Chief Greg McCurdy said.

The Las Vegas Strip was closed in both directions as a dozen ambulances and scores of police officers and firefighters tended to the injured and interviewed witnesses. Thousands of onlookers lined police tape that stretched hundreds of feet along the Strip.

Lynette Farmer, 33, of Woodstock, Georgia, walked by the scene after seeing the chaos from her hotel room at Paris Las Vegas.

"We didn't hear the crash," she said. "But we saw people lying on the sidewalk."

Farmer's husband, Andy, said the couple had been down the same stretch of the Strip about an hour before the crash.

"The speed on this road is just too fast," said Farmer, a police officer in Canton, Georgia.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/22/ped....ap/index.html

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They really should just close that street off and make it a pedestrian mall - and then make the casinos use the side and back streets as the motor entrances. It is soooo jammed packed at night it is ridiculous.