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A woman who had been smoking crack cocaine drove a Volvo station wagon through the crowded Unifest street festival in Southeast Washington on the evening of June 2, 2007, striking dozens of people as the annual event wound down for the day, according to police and court records.

Tonya Bell, 30, of Oxon Hill, Maryland, entered the festival area in the Anacostia neighborhood shortly before 8 p.m. and accelerated along the avenue at the center of the event, police said. The car struck a stage where people had been dancing and made two passes through the crowd at speeds that reached as high as 70 mph, according to prosecutors. Bell's 7-year-old daughter was in the vehicle and was not hurt.

Bystanders scrambled to stop the car. Parents pulled children out of its path and threw empty strollers under the wheels, witnesses said. Officers drove two police motor scooters beneath the Volvo to wedge it to a halt, and a man reached through a window and shifted the transmission into park, according to accounts of the scene.

"It was chaos. People were just lying everywhere," Linda Greene, who lived near the crash site, told The Washington Post. "There were mangled strollers, kids with broken legs."

As many as 49 people were injured, police and prosecutors said. About 35 were taken to eight area hospitals, seven of them with serious injuries, including two children younger than 3. No one was killed. The first 911 calls reached dispatchers within minutes of the car entering the crowd, and emergency crews reported a mass-casualty scene along the festival route.

Bell told investigators she had spent the day driving from corner to corner buying crack, police said. On October 23, 2007, she pleaded guilty in D.C. Superior Court before Judge Herbert B. Dixon Jr. to four counts of aggravated assault while armed, 10 counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of second-degree cruelty to children. The "armed" element of the charge referred to the car.

On January 8, 2008, Dixon sentenced Bell to 25 years in prison, the top of the range set by her plea agreement. Ten of her victims spoke at the hearing. Unifest, which had been marking its 25th anniversary, was suspended after the crash and did not return to Anacostia until 2009.