The people killed in the crash hailed from a diverse set of backgrounds that, in better circumstances, might be said to epitomize the vibrancy for which SXSW and Austin are known. Tatum, an 18-year-old from Fort Worth, was visiting SXSW with his girlfriend Curtisha Davis, who survived. Jamie West, a 27-year-old, had moved to Austin with her husband Evan West several years earlier from Indiana; the two were wearing helmets and sharing a motorcycle when the car struck them at 53 miles per hour, killing her and leaving him, as Jamie West's mother Shon Cook said at trial, "broken beyond repair." Steven Craenmehr, hit while he was on a bicycle, was a 35-year-old music agency employee and musician visiting SXSW from the Netherlands. Sandy Le, a 26-year-old from a Vietnamese-American family in Mississippi, had moved to Austin with plans of returning to college.

Eric Nagurney, who was Le's roommate and close friend, still finds it surreal that she's gone. “I remember feeling very numb at the time, because I wasn't prepared to deal with a tragedy that strange,” he said. “I woke up that morning to phone calls — none of which were entirely clear as to what happened — and eventually figured out that she was in the hospital and that it was very, very serious." Le was pronounced dead on March 17, 2014.

Lauren Zielinski, a former Austin resident and nurse who currently lives in Colorado, was at SXSW in 2014 on vacation. She can be spotted in photos from the night of the accident, wearing a white and black jacket with a black hat. In one, she is asking a police officer for more resuscitative equipment. In another, she's trying to help count out CPR. She told me she was at the eastern corner of 9th and Red River, across from the Mohawk, when Owens' car flew through the intersection, and she rushed to help the people who were hurt. She had crossed the street just seconds before Owens crashed through, barely missing being hit herself.

"I want the victims' families to know how hard we all tried to help in absolutely every way possible, and that their loved ones were not alone during the aftermath," Zielinski said. "I have intense vivid memories of talking to Sandy Le with other providers at the scene. We told her we were there for her and to hang on. I remember holding her hand as someone else performed CPR, and just an overall feeling of us using every single bit of energy to try and save her.”

Moody recalled a "fight or flight" feeling among the Mohawk staffers working that night. "We all go through life hoping that we don't have to see blood or pain, but when it happens, you just go into help mode," he said. "Obviously it takes time to coordinate emergency services. Our guys, though none of us went to medical school, had to fill that until it happened.”

It wasn't rare for those affected to wonder what they might have done differently. "I would always wish that there was something I could do," Meredith Bradley said. "I had a big truck. Why didn't I just move into the center of the street and he could have hit the side of the truck instead of everybody else? But you just can't keep thinking about those things."

Eric Sagotsky, a Los Angeles television engineer who was at SXSW to record video footage for SPIN, tried to document the scene with his camera; prosecutors later presented the harrowing results as evidence at trial. The full enormity of what happened didn't sink in until after he turned in his video to police. He saw a group of young people he'd filmed, who less than an hour earlier had been so excited to be at SXSW, now "sobbing" as their friend lay in an ambulance. “The impact of an event like this is not the same as a traffic accident or a targeted murder," Sagotsky told me. "When something like this happens, one person has the ability to impact hundreds of lives."