Lincoln County Detention Center inmate Marisa Border, who killed a motorcycle rider near Pony Springs near Pioche last July, was the featured speaker at the Driving, Distractions and Consequences program last week in Panaca and Alamo.

Sponsored by the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department and the local Nevada Highway Patrol, the program was presented at the high schools in both towns for all middle school and high school students.

Four different demonstrations, some hands on, were given to the students showing some of the consequences that can occur when making bad choices while driving a vehicle.

Highlight of the program was an assembly with Border. A former prosecuting attorney as well as criminal defense attorney in the City of Henderson, Border, 36, was recently convicted and sentenced to serve time in prison for the death of 54-year old James Tanner on U.S. 93. He was the lead rider of a group of motorcycles and was making a left turn into the Pony Springs rest area  when hit by Border in her northbound Chevy Tahoe SUV.

Dressed in her detention center clothes, wearing handcuffs and a tie around her ankles, she told students your whole life can be changed in less than a heartbeat by bad choices made while driving, as her’s has been. She related she had been frustrated by her two young kids fighting with each other in the back seat of the car, as they were headed to a family campout at Cave Lake and decided to speed past the line of motorcycles slowing to make the turn. Traveling nearly 80 mph, she ultimately hit and ran over Tanner who died at the scene.

“No matter how good a person you may be, or what level of success you may have achieved, making a bad choice while driving, can end it all in seconds,” she said.

Border said she has no idea whether she will lose her law license when she completes her sentence, or even be able to run again for a judge’s seat, which had been her ambition.

“Would you want a judge who had been to jail?” she asked students. She doesn’t know what the answer would be.