Truck Driver Shot to Death on Freeway

A truck driver hauling mail from Los Angeles to Bakersfield was apparently stopped on the shoulder of Interstate 5 near Gorman on Monday night and fatally wounded by gunfire as he sat in the cab of his rig, authorities said.

Witnesses told Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies that they saw a man standing next to the cab, arguing with the trucker, just before the 8 p.m. shooting.

The driver, Edward Watkins, 36, of San Gabriel, was flown by helicopter to a Valencia hospital, where he died about an hour later. He had been shot several times in the upper body.

“Based on the information we have now, there is no indication that the mail was the target of the assault,” Gary Jones, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, said Tuesday.

No mail was taken and there were no signs of tampering with the truck, Jones said.

‘A Personal Matter’

“Based on that,” he said, “it may have been a personal matter directed at the driver of the truck .” After the shooting, the truck, with Watkins slumped at the wheel, rolled backward down an incline until it hit a freeway guardrail and jackknifed. For a time, three lanes of northbound traffic were blocked, the California Highway Patrol said.

Witnesses said the attacker got into an older model car and sped north.

“That’s all we have,” Sheriff’s Deputy Bob Stoneman said Tuesday. “He’s dead, and we haven’t found the bad guy.”

An employee of the Los Angeles-based Auston & Sons Trucking Co., which contracts with the Postal Service to haul mail, Watkins was a regular driver on the Los Angeles-to-Bakersfield route, making the trip at least three times a week, company owner Matthew Auston said.

Auston described Watkins as a “very reliable person” who had been driving big rigs for six years.

After the shooting, a substitute driver completed the trip to Bakersfield.