(Court TV) — Chante Jawan Mallard was driving home from a dance club in Arlington, Texas, in the early hours of Oct. 26, 2001, when she struck 37-year-old Gregory Biggs. The homeless man's upper torso smashed through her windshield.

What happened next is almost unbelievable. Except that Mallard admits to it.

With Biggs still embedded in the windshield, she continued to drive to her Fort Worth home and parked her 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier in her garage. According to police and Mallard's confession, she periodically checked on Biggs, who remained stuck in the windshield, alive and moaning in pain. Mallard said she apologized to Biggs during the visits, but never made an effort to extract him. Nor did she contact police or summon medical help.

Mallard said she doesn't know when Biggs died — presumably sometime during the early morning — because she stopped checking on the injured man. Two friends of the defendant, Clete Deneal Jackson and Herbert Tyrone Cleveland, say Mallard called one of them. The two have admitted that they went to Mallard's house and disposed of Biggs' body in a nearby park.

The men were to be star prosecution witnesses as Mallard stood trial for murder and tampering with evidence in June 2003. The 27-year-old faced life in prison if convicted.

Star witnesses

Jackson received a 10-year sentence and Cleveland a 9-year term in a plea agreement in which they admitted to tampering with evidence and agreed to testify against Mallard. The duo said they removed Biggs from the car within 24 hours of the crash.

On Oct. 27, 2001, two elderly men told a firefighter that they had seen a dead body in Cobb Park. Initially, Fort Worth police believed Biggs was killed in an auto accident close to the park.

But the autopsy determined that Biggs must have been hit somewhere else and then transported to Cobb Park. The medical examiner concluded that Biggs' injuries were too severe to be sustained near the park, where driving at the high speeds necessary to inflict them would have been almost impossible.

The medical examiner also concluded that while Biggs had broken bones, he suffered no major trauma to his internal organs and could have survived if had he received prompt medical attention. In the examiner's opinion, Biggs bled to death.

Four long months

For four months, police were baffled. They got a major break on Feb. 25, 2002, when Maranda Daniel, an acquaintance of Mallard, came forward. Daniel reported that around Valentine's Day, she had been at a friend's house with six other girls, including Mallard. The girls were talking, some were drinking, and they were trying to decide who would drive when they went out later.

Daniel told police that during their conversation that night, Mallard said she couldn't drive. When asked why, she giggled and explained she had hit a man with her car and he had gone through the windshield.

"I hit this white man," Mallard allegedly told Daniel, laughing.

Daniel told police that Mallard said she was on Ecstasy and was also drunk at the time of the crash. Mallard also allegedly told Daniel that when she returned home after the crash, her boyfriend was in the house and the two had sex before she returned to the garage to check on Biggs.

Mallard would later deny Daniel's account, but police obtained a warrant and searched Mallard's home on Feb. 26, 2002. They found her Cavalier with the windshield and rear window broken. The seats had also been removed.

Forensic tests showed blood and hair from the victim still lodged in remnants of the car's windshield.

Chante Mallard accompanied police officers to the station and agreed to make a statement.

The confession

Mallard told police what had happened, but with a few differences from Daniel's account. According to Mallard, she had only two drinks at the party and said she believed someone may have slipped something in one of her drinks. She also later denied having sex with her boyfriend while Biggs lay dying in the garage.

Mallard did tell police that after Biggs was removed from her windshield, several days passed before she could go back to the garage. When she did, she said she took the seats out of the car and put them in the backyard. She subsequently burned one of the seats.

By all accounts, Chante Mallard does not have a criminal record. She is state-certified as a nurse's aide, but has moved between jobs at nursing homes in recent years.

She was born and raised in the Fort Worth area, and, according to her mother, was a Girl Scout who volunteered to help the mentally retarded. One of her high school classmates said she was an "A" student who worked as a teacher's aide.

Her defense

Before Judge James Wilson issued a gag order in the case, Mallard's first defense lawyer, Mike Heiskell, told reporters that this was not a murder case, but simply a situation involving "a frightened, emotionally distraught young woman who had an accident, panicked and made a wrong choice. Then she called some friends who led her down the wrong path."

He believed she should only be convicted of "failure to stop and render aid."

Mallard was behind bars awaiting trial in lieu of $250,000 bail. Her new attorneys, Jeff Kearney and Reagan Wynn, will faced off with prosecutor Richard Alpert.

A Tarrant County jury decided her fate in a trial broadcast live on Court TV.