Last night in Oak Cliff, at about 8 p.m., two Dallas police officers watched a dark-colored Cadillac speed through a red light. The car did stop at the next red light, at Hampton Road and Illinois Avenue, which is where the cops caught up with it.

At first, it seemed like it would be a run-of-the-mill traffic stop, but they quickly realized that the woman driving the Cadillac, who they identified later as 39-year-old Reshonda Fields, wasn't obeying the red light; she had plowed into the pack of a Nissan pickup. She was still doing it, too, ramming into the car over and over until she had pushed it across the intersection and into a nearby parking lot. Fields drove on, ignoring the two officers, and made it two miles before finally crashing into a street light.

The cops, approaching with their guns drawn, could see smoke filling the interior of the car. The "vehicle was subsequently observed to be on fire, swiftly becoming engulfed," as they would note later in their incident report.

Still, Fields ignored the cops' increasingly insistent demands that she get out of the car. Finally, one of them shattered the driver's-side window with his night stick and unlocked the door, placing her in handcuffs as he moved her away from the burning vehicle for questioning.

Fields told police that the preceding chase, the one that ended with her car wrapped around a light pole, had been "fun." Then, she gave the cops a clue as to why she might have thought so.

"I was smoking a little wet tonight," she told them, meaning weed laced with formaldehyde, PCP or both, in other words.

She continued: "I just had a bad day. My kids are testing me. My baby's father won't make him mind."