'Hit and carry' driver denies she is a murderer

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A nurse's aide has gone on trial for murder, accused of hitting a man with her car and leaving him stuck in the windscreen and dying as she drove home.

Chante Jawan Mallard, 27, faces life in prison if convicted of first-degree murder in Fort Worth, Texas.

She told police her car hit Gregory Biggs, 37, with such force his head and shoulders jammed into the windscreen and his legs were bent over the roof, his trousers tearing almost completely off his body.

Instead of stopping, police say, she drove about a mile down a six-lane motorway, the man still lodged and bleeding in the jagged windscreen, then continued through town to her home.

She pulled into her garage, closed the door, then sat in the car and cried, repeatedly apologising to the man as he moaned, she later told detectives.

"Chante kept going in and out of the garage telling the man she was sorry," the police report said. "She does not know how long it took the man to die she quit going out into the garage."

Biggs, a former bricklayer who had been living in a homeless shelter, was found dead the next day, his body dumped in a park.

Mike Heiskell, Mallard's lawyer, said before the trial that she "was simply a frightened, emotionally distraught young woman who had an accident, panicked and made a wrong choice."

Police initially said Biggs lived for several days in Mallard's garage, slowly bleeding to death from his multiple fractures and cuts. But County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani later said Biggs, whose left leg was nearly severed, probably lived only a few hours after he was hit. He could have survived if he had received medical attention, Peerwani has said.

When Biggs' body was found, authorities had no leads until four months later, when a tipster said Mallard talked about the incident at a party.
 
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