The State - News from Dec. 16, 1986

An elderly Berkeley woman was shot and critically wounded when a young woman hitchhiker she had picked up at a rest stop on Interstate 5 near Tracy ordered her out of the car and then opened fire with a .22-caliber pistol when she refused, authorities said. Esther Osnas, 75, was then pushed from the vehicle by Sheryl Lynn Smith, 20, of Concord. When Smith turned the car around to return to the rest stop, police and California Highway Patrol vehicles pursued at speeds up to 100 m.p.h. until she put the pistol to her head and fired, investigators said. Driverless, the car veered down an embankment, through a fence and into a field. Osnas and Smith were both hospitalized in critical condition. Smith’s boyfriend, Ed Berhardt, 18, of Phoenix, who was arrested at the rest stop on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and theft of a vehicle by armed robbery, told police that he and Smith decided to steal a car when their station wagon broke down.