Last week, it was reported that a nurse's aide in Fort Worth, TX had hit and killed a homeless man with her car many months ago--in October of last year was when the man's body was discovered. The way the situation played out was this way: Chante Mallard was going home from a party. The homeless man was hit and knocked onto her windshield; instead of stopping, she kept driving until she got home.

After getting home, she parked her car in the garage, went upstairs, made love to her boyfriend, came back down to her car--the dying man still on it--apologized to the man, as he pleaded with her to get him medical help, and went back into her apartment. The next day or days, she, supposedly on advice of some of her close friends, took the man, then having died, to a park where they dumped his body.

From conflicting reports, she went into the garage periodically and apologized but never called any medical help or the police. The story was finally revealed as she eventually told friends and associates about the incident when they asked her why she was not driving her car; the one she had killed the homeless man with.

Ms. Chante Mallard is a 25-year old nurse's aide who seemingly has the strangest mindset and even stranger friends who advised her what to do. She said that she had been drinking and was on the drug Ecstasy when she hit and killed the homeless man. Was she on it for days?

Even in America, with its peculiar strangeness, this has to be as strange as one can imagine. Have we become so callous to the downtrodden and homeless that we now can kill them and just disregard their very presence, even when they are imminently upon us? Or is this just an aberration that is Ms. Mallard's brand of madness--a claim, we can be sure her attorney will raise in her defense? []