Eric Pitkanen had been in Las Vegas for less than nine hours, and he already missed his 15-month-old son back home in Oregon.

As the athletic trainer and his team of college wrestlers walked past the famous hotels lining the Strip, he called his wife and explained that as much as he wanted to see his son on video, the teeming sidewalk wasn’t the best place to do it.

“It’s not safe to FaceTime while we walk the Strip,” he said.

The words had barely left his mouth when a 1996 Oldsmobile jumped the curb 30 feet in front of him and plunged into the crowd.

Read the article “Witness Recounts Vegas Strip Rampage: ‘It Was Gas the Whole Way’” on latimes.com.