Suspect Has Long Record of Addiction

Even Before Tonya Bell Allegedly Plowed Through a Crowd, Her Life Followed a Harrowing Path

Tonya Bell's life was already crashing at 15.

She had one baby and was pregnant with another, according to court records. She was using PCP, and after her boyfriend was shot and killed, she would turn to smoking crack cocaine, records say.

It was the start of a long, destructive addiction that would land her in trouble again and again, and never so glaringly as on Saturday night, when Bell, high on crack, plowed a car into a crowded street festival in Southeast Washington, police say.

In a few harrowing moments, dozens of people, some of them small children, were injured. After a daring effort to stop the car, police arrested Bell, 30, whose 7-year-old daughter was in the Volvo station wagon. The child, uninjured, is in the care of the city's child protective services agency.

Charged with aggravated assault while armed, Bell was held without bond yesterday after appearing in D.C. Superior Court. Wearing a hospital gown and a black surgical boot for her injured ankle, she was in a place she has come to know well over her troubled life, having cycled through the courthouse many times.

Bell was also a familiar face in the neighborhood where Saturday's mayhem took place. She grew up on nearby Chicago Street SE. She attended Ballou Senior High School for a time, according to court records. And since April, she had worked as a temporary clerical assistant in the office of the Ward 8 D.C. Council member, Marion Barry (D), where she answered phones and distributed mail.

To people who know her from her time growing up, Bell was a troubled girl who was often on drugs and would argue and fight with neighbors when she was high.

"When she wasn't high, she wasn't a bad person," said Stephen Cook, 52, who grew up in the area. "She was always struggling, I think."

Nearly every year since she became an adult, Bell has been in court for one case or another, winding up with convictions and prison or jail stays for drug and other charges. The court records -- in particular a 2000 psychological evaluation of Bell -- show a woman whose life has been defined by drugs and whose problems escalated after a great deal of personal loss.

The psychological examination was done in April 2000 at the request of Bell's defense attorney in a felony drug case. It was an effort to secure meaningful help for Bell's drug addiction and her mental health problems, which had three times led her to seek assistance at St. Elizabeths, the city's public psychiatric hospital. The report is packed with details about Bell's struggles as a teenager and young adult.

During an interview with the psychologist who prepared the report, Bell traced her drug use to age 14, around the time she dropped out of school, where she said she had been an honor roll student.

Bell said her boyfriend, who was five years older, had introduced her to drugs. At 14, she began using marijuana, and at 15, she started using PCP, the report quoted her as saying. When she was 14, she had a child with her boyfriend, and the following year she was pregnant with their second child. That's when the boyfriend was shot and killed, she told the psychologist.