Tragic Anniversary Trip Ends with Woman Facing Prison for Fatal Incident

A Nevada woman faces a lengthy prison sentence after a tragic incident on the Las Vegas Strip, where she drove into a crowd, injuring many and tragically ending the life of a mother of three. The mother was on an anniversary getaway with her husband when the tragic event unfolded.

“Where”s mommy?” Jessica Valenzuela’s daughter, Layla Valenzuela, asked her father after he returned from the 2015 trip without her. The teen described the emotional moment during Lakeisha Holloway’s sentencing hearing last week, broadcast by local NBC affiliate KSNV.

At the time of the crash, the driver, who was 24, was known as Holloway, but she has since changed her name to Paris Morton. Her guilty plea to charges of second-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon, along with battery using a deadly weapon, resulted in an 18-year prison sentence.

In the aftermath of the incident, heart-wrenching memories persist for the family left behind. Layla Valenzuela, then just 8, poignantly recalled asking her father, “Where’s mommy? Where’s mommy? I want to see her. Where is she?”

Her sister, Giana, who was 9 at the time, shared her own haunting memory in court. She expressed her sorrow over not having the chance to say goodbye to their mother, Jessica Valenzuela, as they believed she would soon return home from her trip. “I think about that a lot,” Giana reflected.

“I think about that a lot,” Giana said.

Prosecutors accused Morton of having a mental breakdown that led to her veering off the road and crashing into 37 people on the Strip, including Jessica Valenzuela, located on a sidewalk along Las Vegas Boulevard in December 2015.

Morton was homeless, out of money, and living in her car with her 3-year-old daughter when the crash happened after traveling to Las Vegas from Oregon, according to prosecutors. She had been staying in parking garages and “kept getting run off by security of the properties,” according to a police report obtained by The Associated Press.

“She ended up on the Strip, ‘a place she did not want to be,’” the report quoted her as saying, according to AP. While Morton could not explain why she drove onto the sidewalk, she remembered bodies “bouncing off her windshield, breaking it.”

Morton’s case reportedly dragged on for years due to mental health evaluations and changes in her legal representation, among other issues. She was found not competent to stand trial in 2020 and then deemed competent in 2021 after undergoing a series of evaluations at a state psychiatric facility before pleading guilty in August 2025.

“Your pain, I have never taken for granted,” Morton said at her sentencing, while sobbing. “And to see you today, finally, that you get to have this moment after 11 years. For 11 years, I never wanted to say the wrong thing. [No matter] how many sorries, and how much remorse, words are never enough. I feel like saying this statement and reading this statement to you is an injustice in itself. I’m so sorry for your pain.”