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Three months after she narrowly escaped an attempted car jacking with her life West Wendover business woman is still struggling to get her car and her life back.
Now recuperating in Las Vegas, Rattana Keomanivong is on foot while her car a 2006 Audi is still being held as evidence by the Elko County Public Defender’s office.
“It is a real hardship,” she said in a Tuesday interview with the High Desert Advocate. “On top of everything else they won’t release my car.”
Keomanivong was critically wounded in the New Year’s Eve crime spree of Angela Hill and Robert MacFarland that began with the double murder of an elderly Utah couple in Mt. Pleasant and ended four days later when the two desperadoes walked out of the high desert and surrender to police at the foot of the Pequops Mountains.
The owner of Wendover’s Animal House Gym, Keomanivong was hailed as a hero who by fighting back and thwarting an attempted car jacking played a key role in ending a murderous cross country crime spree by the modern day Bonnie and Clyde.
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Keomanivong had no idea that the young couple who initially stopped her as she left the Red Garter early Saturday morning December 31 had already committed two murders hours before.
In fact no one knew that Ann Fullwood, aged 69, and her husband Woody, aged 70, were even dead in their Mt. Pleasant home.
Standing less than 5’1” tall and tipping the scales at barely 115 lbs., the Wendover woman probably appeared to be the perfect victim. They were wrong.
It was Hill who accompanied Rattana in her car while McFarland followed behind in the couples’ stolen car. As soon as the odds evened with only Hill and Keomanivong in the car, Keomanivong attacked her car jacker by “biting her ear, neck and forcing her from the vehicle,”. Hill fired a shot at the woman as she drove away, according to the police report.
Keomanivong was struck in the back of the head, but she was able to drive herself to the police station and give police a description of the two before she was airlifted to Salt Lake for emergency surgery.
Thwarted in their attempt to steal Keomanivong’s vehicle the couple sped off west bound on I-80. Their stolen Saturn was found abandoned in Wells.
If Keomanivong had not fought back and won, police speculate it could have been hours if not days before the two slipped up again.
“They had already established a pattern of attacking helpless people, robbing them, stealing their vehicles and killing them before anyone knew what was happening” said one detective. “If not for Mrs. Keomanivong they could have been well on their way to Reno or San Francisco with a trail of dead bodies behind them.”
Despite the accolades, Keomanivong must now live with injuries for the rest of her life. Early hope that she would completely recover have faded. A recent brain scan suggests that some of the damage may be permanent or take a very long time to heal. With medical bills piling up she still must go for weekly check ups and all of those troubles are exacerbated because the Public Defender still will not release her car.
“I did put a call into the Washoe county Crime Lab forensic unit to see if they completed all their work,” said Elko PD Fred Leeds. “If they are done I will release it. There is no reason for her to suffer if she does not have to.”
Leed’s who is representing Hill suggested in the woman’s preliminary hearing that it was MacFarland and not Hill who shot Keomanivong. He based that assertion on the trajectory of the bullet hole in back of the vehicle.
That suggestion was not enough to sway Elko Justice of the Peace Barbara Nethery who bound the Utah woman over for trial for attempted murder last week in Elko.