WASHINGTON, D.C. - Like many artists, Corrina Mehiel sometimes harbored deep insecurities about the direction her art was taking her.

"I've spent a whole lot of time and energy in my life trying to understand and 'become' an artist - whatever that means," she wrote late last year.

But Mehiel, who grew up in central Pennsylvania, graduated from Penn State and later headed the Harrisburg nonprofit arts organization, Danzante, was always clear about the purpose of her art and the lofty goal she held for its power and potential.

"I ... continue to try to use my visual language to communicate ideas of healing and peace," the 34-year-old artist wrote, finding a clarity of purpose even as questions, doubts and second-guesses swirled around where exactly her journey would lead.

By all accounts, artist Corrina Mehiel's creative spirit had been stoked by her experiences in Washington, D.C. Then, Mehiel's gentle artist's journey inadvertently intersected with the path of a brutal killer, identified as 29-year-old El Hadji Toure. She never made it out of D.C. alive. Here, she is pictured creating her "Parking Meter Gardens" art project in Cincinnati in 2016, part of a life-long journey of engaging disadvantaged communities through art.

Most recently, Mehiel's quest to produce art with the power to heal brought her to the nation's capital. There, she joined the artist Mel Chin, serving as his program assistant at the Corcoran School of the Art & Design, where he was a visiting professor.

Their collaboration was precisely the kind of art Corrina Mehiel (pronounced Carina Meal) craved to create. It had Mehiel reaching out to engage children at D.C.'s city schools while rubbing elbows at high-powered exhibit openings with the likes of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and other political figures.

In the process, the art, dubbed the "Fundred" project, empowered children to "mint" their own form of currency to shed the light of change on the lead water crisis afflicting struggling cities such as Flint, Michigan.

The project perfectly exemplified the community engagement that once had Mehiel planting blooming flowers in the hollowed-out heads of old parking meters on an otherwise stark urban streetscape in Cincinnati.

By all accounts, Mehiel's two-month stint assisting Chin at the Corcoran was a smashing success. A final, celebratory dinner at the artist's residence on the evening of March 19 marked the end of this leg of Mehiel's artist's journey.

By Monday morning, March 20, Mehiel was busy lugging her belongings from a rented basement apartment on the 600 block of 14th Street on Capitol Hill and packing them into her Toyota Prius, parked on the quiet residential block's curb.

Mehiel was preparing to return to her family's home in Burnsville, N.C. The next phase of her artist's journey remained to be determined. But by all accounts, Mehiel's creative spirit had been stoked by her experiences in D.C.

Without doubt, big things awaited her.

Then, in a single, random instant, everything changed. Mehiel's gentle artist's journey intersected with the path of a brutal killer.

'It's really tragic'

Less than a block away, a man, later identified by police as 29-year-old El Hadji Alpha Madiou Toure, exited a municipal bus around 10 a.m. Monday, March 20.

Residential security cameras showed the tall, hooded figure walking down 14th Street, lingering among the well-kept row homes along the 600 block.

He crossed the street, then waited. Observed. Paced. Then he made his move.

Toure turned toward where Mehiel was packing her Prius.

The security camera footage didn't show what happened next, but authorities said Toure crept up on Mehiel, pushing her inside her basement apartment in broad daylight.

In the nearly four hours that followed, that home became a brutal torture chamber, according to court documents.

Toure took a "sharp object," those documents said, and proceeded to "torture" Mehiel, stabbing her repeatedly in the neck area while she was tied up. There were defensive stab wounds on one of her palms, as well.

Suspect El Hadji Toure, 29, has been arrested and charged with premeditated first-degree murder, accused of robbing, tying up, torturing and stabbing to death artist Corrina Mehiel, 24, as she was packing to leave Washington, D.C., on March 20, after having just completed her most recent art project in the nation's capital.

It's believed Toure tortured Mehiel to gain the pass code for her ATM card. By the early afternoon, he apparently had what he wanted.

Toure left Mehiel for dead inside the apartment and drove off in her Prius, according to court documents. Among his first stops was a convenience store ATM to test the stolen bank card and the pass code he so brutally procured.

It worked, to the tune of $400, according to court documents.

Within hours, Toure was at another convenience store ATM, that time withdrawing $500.

Over the course of the next week, Toure withdrew a total of more than $4,000 from Mehiel's bank account in a series of transactions ranging from $400 to $800 at various ATMs around the D.C. area. Those withdrawals proved to be major clues that eventually helped police catch him, according to court documents.

Meanwhile, Mehiel's body wasn't discovered until late Tuesday afternoon. Her parents, expecting her return to North Carolina, called 911 when Mehiel didn't show up and wouldn't answer her cellphone.

Something was wrong. But no one expected just how wrong. Not until police found her bloody remains in the back room of the basement apartment.

An autopsy showed Mehiel suffered major stab wounds to her neck. The worst of them pierced the carotid artery, the jugular, her voice box and her airway.

But there also were lighter puncture wounds on her neck, suggesting those were meant to torture her, court documents said.

Finally, her left lung, spleen, and her spinal cord all were punctured by deep stab wounds to her torso, according to the autopsy.

Neighbor Elizabeth Risley, who said she was gardening around the same time Mehiel was attacked just feet away, called Toure "a monster."

"We're used to break-ins of cars on the street and maybe a mugging," Risley tells a PennLive reporter. "But he was a monster. He loitered here a long time. He saw an opportunity. He bound her and stabbed her. He was in there a long time. He tortured her to get a few hundred dollars from her ATM. People are shocked. It's really tragic. I feel so sorry. My heart goes out to her family and friends and co-workers."

Watch as Risely recounts the shocking crime that has unsettled her Capitol Hill neighborhood:

Proud Feminist

Mehiel was a self-described proud feminist who used her teenage reading of Hillary Clinton's "It Takes a Village" as an early marker for her entire life. This evolved into her passionate pursuit of art with the power to engage and heal communities, particularly disadvantaged ones.

The bedrock beliefs that shaped so much of her artist's journey took a brutal beating throughout the tumultuous events of 2016. Mehiel was left reeling.

In a December, 2016, blog entry on her website, www.corrinamehiel.com, she questioned everything, including the very direction of her art and where it was taking her.

Here, she was dispirited over a series of police shootings of unarmed black males, as well as the terrorist shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida:

"So many tragedies (are) inflicted on the full spectrum of non-white males in my country. I have spent many days trying to understand this moment in our history. Feeling so proud of what we have all accomplished. Sobbing with the country at the death of the young, beautiful people in Orlando. Crying to my father after watching Philando Castile pass in real time in front of the whole world," Mehiel writes.

Then, there was the presidential election, which brought Donald Trump to power in D.C., not Mehiel's teen role model, Hillary Clinton:

"And through it all (I am) watching the women in my life spend the year in worried apprehension. Trying to be excited for the future, and all the while listening as others rallied around chants of hate and fear toward people of color, people of other religions, people of the lesser sex, people who don't check one gender box," she writes.

And while these events caused Mehiel to question her artist's journey, there was never a thought of backing down or turning away:

"Even in this sub-category of who I am -- an "artist" -- I am aware of what it is to be "woman" and what our role has been. To be an object. To be either an object of beauty or a "nasty woman." I thought back to my graduate school work and the mentors who helped me find a voice that I'm still looking to understand... I'm certain my work will have new meaning to me forever."

As the artist Mel Chin said in wake of her killing: "Corrina was a feminist. She wanted to end violence against women."

Only now, her story has become the most cautionary of tales.

Closing in

El Hadji Toure, known in D.C. circles as Elie Brown, left plenty of bread crumbs for pursuing police. Yet a full week after Mehiel's brutal killing, he remained at large and deadly dangerous.

From the very start of the manhunt, police tracked the continuing series of withdrawals using Mehiel's ATM card. This led to a trove of security footage showing the same suspect who was caught on tape on Mehiel's block before and after her killing.

Soon, Toure's face was leading newscasts all across metropolitan Washington. Police also were tracking Mehiel's stolen Toyota Prius, along with a mass transit card that Toure allegedly purchased with her bank card.

Police were able to turn the many images of their suspect, along with other evidence, into a name and a rap sheet. The suspect was quickly identified as Toure, who had an address in Laurel, Maryland. He was also a wanted fugitive in Tennessee, where he allegedly violated probation on a robbery conviction.

The combination of Toure's continuing ATM withdrawals, along with his movements using the transit card, allowed police to draw ever closer to their suspect. Yet, maddeningly, they remained a step behind.

Finally, a parking ticket turned up Mehiel's Prius on Thursday, March 23. Police believed they finally had their break. They staked out the car, but Toure never returned to it. Police just couldn't seem to catch him - even as he continued to move freely around the D.C. area, as if taunting them.

Then early on Monday, March 27, an informant, perhaps spurred by a $25,000 reward in the case, phoned D.C. detectives.

The informant had been in touch with Toure and shared many details about him, all contained in court documents:

Toure knew "he's hot," the informant said. So much so, Toure complained about the near-constant newscasts featuring his image. At one point, Toure even watched a newscast about the case on his phone, then asked the informant, "Does that really look like me?"

Already, Toure said he was down to $400, from the $4,000 he allegedly withdrew. He told the informant he "needs to make a move." Toure knew he couldn't return to his job. He was MIA there all week.

Finally, Toure told the informant that while he intended to rob Mehiel, he never meant to kill her -- but did admit stabbing her, according to court documents.

Yet the big break in the case came when the informant told detectives about the Ford Taurus that Toure was now driving. The car was bought for $1,000 on Friday, March 24, with cash likely siphoned from Mehiel's bank account.

The recent car purchase was why Toure never returned again to his victim's Toyota while it was being watched by police. This move of switching vehicles might have kept Toure on the run indefinitely. But the informant's case-clinching tip included the car's Maryland plates, along with the last location Toure was seen in it -- the 1700 block of Hamlin Street in the city.

D.C. police stopped the suspect's vehicle sometime before 7 a.m. Monday, March 27.

Toure was behind the wheel.

By Tuesday, he was arraigned in District of Columbia Superior Court on a charge of premeditated first-degree murder in Mehiel's killing.

An unfinished life

Mehiel's artist's journey wasn't supposed to end that way. Not days short of her 35th birthday. And certainly not in such an ugly, violent manner.

Her life's work was to bring color and beauty to stark urban landscapes, such as the streets where she planted flowers in old parking meter heads or in inner-city Harrisburg working with Danzante from 2008 to 2010.

At its best, her art was an outstretched hand to downtrodden communities and the often-invisible, forgotten people populating them.

In her eyes, art held the power to change those things. Her strength was embodying that belief on a daily basis, even when she didn't know where her journey would ultimately lead.

Corrina Mehiel's artist's journey wasn't supposed to end this way. Not days short of her 35th birthday. And certainly not in such an ugly, violent manner. Her life's work was to bring color and beauty to stark urban landscapes. Ironically, those who Corrina sought to help most likely would have included her accused killer.

As her obituary states:

"She was a balance of force and beauty. She lived her life fearlessly. Even as a child, she was artistic and creative, taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. She was thoughtful and provocative; using art to bring awareness to the rights of women and minorities and to the injustices of the world. She was compassionate and friendly, making friends through experiences all over the world."

Her most recent collaborator, the artist Mel Chin, praised the beautiful contradictions that defines both Mehiel - and all great art:

"It is hard to be smart and sensitive at the same time. Corrina was," Chin, who declined an interview request from PennLive.com, said in a written statement.

"She was intellectually powerful, physically strong and capable of taking on any challenge," he added. "She raised the quality of the collective experience. As an artist, she couldn't hold back. She would leap to help someone in need."

Ironically, those who Mehiel sought to help most likely would have included her accused killer.

"She would be the first to point out that victims of violence in D.C. are disproportionately people of color," Chin said in his statement. "She was committed to fairness and justice, and always fought for the rights of others."

Most of all, Mehiel was still seeking to unlock all those hidden secrets of what it meant to be both a woman and an artist.

From her blog:

"To be a woman, for the first part of my life, meant to be human," she wrote late last year. "I loved being a girl! I loved all things soft and hugs and daydreaming about being a mom. I looked up to the women in my life. I loved how the women I was around were caring and nurturing. My Mom spent a lot of time talking to me about my worth, how to find a path toward loving myself, loving others, and being loved... Take from it what you will."

All that's left now is the art she gave to the world. Captured within it is nothing less than her spirit, one Mehiel was still working to understand and share.

That can never be taken away.

"To the person who did this to her: You are too late. You failed," the artist Chin defiantly concluded in his written statement.

"Corrina Mehiel has already liberated and emboldened so many people to fight for their beliefs. Her spirit will continue," he said.

And so it does, like a lone flower blooming on a hardscrabble city street.