‘All of a Sudden, Pow! ... It Was Gunfire’

Rejoicing over the stack of auto parts they had just scavenged from a Wilmington wrecking yard, Willie Burks and James Wiggins were driving north on the Harbor Freeway near Redondo Beach Boulevard when the first bullet hit.

“All of a sudden, pow! One shot knocked the back window out,” said Burks, the passenger. “It didn’t crack, it shattered ... we knew it was gunfire. That’s when we both panicked. We both ducked down.”

Still moving at 60 mph, Wiggins, at the wheel, stuck his head up to sneak a peek through the windshield. “Who the hell is shooting at us?” Burks recalled the father of two screaming. Burks could hear the terror in his friend’s voice.

Burks shouted for Wiggins to pull the Pontiac Grand Am over to the shoulder. He didn’t dare look around for the gunman.

Wiggins, a 47-year-old car trader, slammed down the accelerator. “But it didn’t help,” lamented Burks. Wiggins tried to get another glimpse out of the front window, “and that’s when the shots hit him.”

Wiggins’ car veered from the middle lane right into the sound wall as the bullets smashed in from the driver’s side. “We hit the wall. The air bag hit me. Glass hit me,” Burks said.

Still conscious, Burks was pinned down, with Wiggins’ lifeless body slumped over into his lap. Burks could see Wiggins’ gaping head wound.

“It was a terrible thing,” Burks said. “ I see it every night in my sleep.”

Burks, 43, recounted those terrifying seconds for the first time Tuesday during an interview at the Southeast Division police station. On April 13, Burks’ companion became the third of four people killed in five car-to-car shootings on Southern California’s freeways over the last six weeks.

The midafternoon attack, in broad daylight along a busy stretch of freeway where a 20-year-old motorist had been killed just two weeks before, heightened a sense of alarm among commuters, who feared they could be next.

Police from multiple agencies say the shootings appear to be unconnected, without a clear motive. Witnesses are sparse. Clues are limited.

LAPD Det. Sal LaBarbera said Burks and Wiggins unknowingly may have enraged another motorist, but police just don’t know. Detectives have found no other reason someone might have been out to get the two men, he added.

“There may have been some kind of dispute on the road,” he said. “But they may not have been privy to it. Unknowingly, they may have cut in front of someone or maybe someone was angered because they were driving too slow.”

Police have conducted extensive ballistics tests. LaBarbera said Wiggins’ shooting may be linked to an earlier road rage incident in the Harbor area. That one did not involve guns.

LaBarbera declined to discuss specifics because it could jeopardize the ongoing investigation. “We ask anyone with information to contact us immediately,” he said.

Burks also pleaded for the public to come forward with information.

“If they have seen something, they need to say something,” he said.

Other freeway violence included the March 12 fatal shooting of a 32-year-old Fontana engineer on the Costa Mesa Freeway; the March 29 death of a 20-year-old Long Beach college student just five miles north of where Wiggins was attacked; Friday’s killing of a 32-year-old man on the Riverside Freeway at the 91 interchange; and the shooting, again on the Costa Mesa Freeway, of a 32-year-old man wounded in the neck early Sunday.

Burks dislocated his shoulder, ruptured a disc in his back and can only walk, slowly, with a cane after the shooting. But his injuries are nothing compared to his mental anguish, he said.

An Army veteran, Burks said his friendship with Wiggins began five years ago when the older man sold him a used Volvo. “He gave me a good price,” he recalled.

That morning, the pair had headed out from Wiggins’ Southeast Los Angeles neighborhood to the Pick Your Part yard in Wilmington, getting parts from junkers for a Honda and a Saturn. They shelled out about $25 for their finds.

On the way back, they grabbed a bite at a McDonald’s. They weren’t in a hurry.

“We were cruising. We were just going back to his house to take care of his cars,” Burks said. “He was a hard-working husband.”