College is a crazy time in most people’s lives. It’s the first time they can really break away from their families and live freely.

No more parents are checking in at night to make sure the lights are off. All accountability is on the individual, and most new first-year college students put that accountability on hold while they go wild.

It’s a time of experimentation. No rules but what we make for ourselves. No limits but what we set. People either fly high or fail fast based on how they live, with no one else deciding for them.

This leads to misfortune more often than one might think. Because there are so few rules, everything can be on the table. Illicit drugs can enter life very quickly, as can acts of violence.

Without personal restrictions, the world opens up, and sometimes that invites the devil inside where he shouldn’t be: up the nose and into the brain.

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10 /10 Luisa Cutting

Luisa Ines Tudela Harris Cutting was just a normal girl who went to college and made some friends.

One of her best friends, a girl she claimed to be the best of all her friends with whom she ended up becoming the roommate of an off-campus apartment, was Alexa Cannon.

They both went to Radford University in Virginia. They were such good friends they appeared in each other’s social media posts constantly.

9 /10 Good Girls Gone Bad

Luisa was elected as the president of the university’s Latino Student Alliance, a group focused on representing students’ interests like her who shared a Hispanic background so that their voices would count among the many, many other diverse groups that attended the college every year.

Alexa was a psychology major studying the field while also enduring her fight against epilepsy.

They were excellent students with vivid social lives. But somehow, they still hid their mistakes long enough until they were overwhelmed by them.



8 /10 Party Too Hard

For a few nights, Luisa was acting very strange. She was losing sleep and was seen and heard praying constantly. She had a somewhat religious background from her upbringing.

At some point, she started treating her symptoms of degenerating mental fortitude with drugs.

She began with prescriptions, including Xanax and Adderall, which she had been known to abuse before.

Then she started including harder drugs. She did marijuana, mushrooms and confessed to “doing cocaine with the devil.”

7 /10 Breakdown

Luisa murdered Alexa on January 24th. Authorities were alerted to screaming coming from their room, which sounded to the responder like an argument.

The entire incident itself remained blurry in Luisa’s mind, as she had been blacking out and losing time so frequently she lost the trust she had in her own eyes to know what was going on around her.

The drugs guided her to stab her best friend 20 times with a knife from their shared room. Once police arrived, she was lucid and in tears. She knew what she had done.

Radford City Police Department

6 /10 The Process

Luisa was arrested and convicted in a relatively short time. She confessed to her crime and explained it outright with great regret. Once she regained control, she was in despair over what she did.

It wasn’t an act done out of anger or passion. It seemed like, according to her defense attorney, she suffered a psychotic breakdown which the drugs brought on, coupled with her history of drug abuse, worsened her episode to the point where it sent her into an aggressive frenzy.

While she was not in complete control of her faculties at the time of the murder, she did choose to do illegal drugs, which made it worse.

5 /10 Her Own Safety

Luisa was hospitalized for 11 days to undergo detoxification and treatment for overdosing on prescription medication.

Afterward, she was kept in police custody, where she attempted to either self-harm or experienced further psychotic breaks where she tried to shove her hand into her mouth.

She acted the whole time strangely, constantly praying and avoiding relaxing activity. She was taken to a mental health facility afterward.

4 /10 Bad Habits Die Hard

It was, unfortunately, not a surprise when the authorities investigated Luisa’s apartment and found multiple items related to drug use.

The history she had with drug abuse even before she came to college. Since then, with little reinforcement to keep her clean, it only got worse.

It’s not known what kind of argument led to the murder, either, as Luisa’s drug-induced breakdown was so severe she had no memory of what happened during it aside from the obvious.

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3 /10 Not A Killer

Luisa confessed immediately and made a similar confession in a police interview. Her story didn’t change, and she showed honest regret and remorse.

It was as close to an accident as possible, but she was tried for second-degree murder – defined as murder done with intent and no prior planning.

She didn’t argue against it, either. She accepted the terms of her guilty plea.

Through it all, she was thinking of Alexa’s family, who was going through their mourning of their daughter, and agreed not to let the trial drag out, which would subject them to even more bad memories of what happened.

2 /10 Sentencing

Luisa was sentenced to 40 years in prison, the maximum that could be levied for her particular brand of crime, with only 20 to be served.

Following that, her sentence would be suspended, and she would be placed under probation for ten years with police interventions when necessary.

She only said she had deep sorrowful regret for what she did and knew nothing could be done to fix what happened.

1 /10 Party Responsibly

Luisa and Alexa’s tale came to a dead end. After the wild night and the horrible morning where Luisa realized what happened, that was it.

Luisa will serve her sentence for the entire 20 years, knowing that she made the ultimate wrong decision, but it wasn’t in her control.

She was battling against a devil – Addiction – and Alexa got in the crossfire of that life or death struggle. College can make bad problems worse, and sometimes people need restrictions to stay controlled.

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