Piece Flies Off Truck on Freeway : Metal Plate Slices Into Car, Just Misses Boy, 7

A woman and her 7-year-old son narrowly escaped serious injury Friday on the Santa Monica Freeway when a five-pound metal plate apparently flew off a passing truck and slammed through the windshield of their car.

“It was right there and I saw it and I just ducked,” said the son, Brian Thompson.

Brian suffered minor scratches on his face but was not hospitalized, the California Highway Patrol reported. His mother, 40-year-old Augustine Thompson of Inglewood, was not injured.

Thompson had just merged onto a westbound lane of the Santa Monica Freeway from the San Diego Freeway and was heading for the 26th Street off-ramp when the object hit at 11:50 a.m. She was on her way to a doctor’s appointment at a Santa Monica office, but her son ended up being the patient when she arrived only minutes later.

CHP Officer Errol Dunnigan said the boy almost certainly would have been hit by the metal plate, which he speculated was used as a construction patch, had it not bounced off the car’s windshield wiper before cutting a two-foot gash in the windshield. The plate was moving with such force that it passed to the rear of the passenger compartment and became embedded in the back seat just beneath the rear window.

“It entered just like a hatchet,” CHP Lt. Clyde Lockley said.

The mother said she never saw or heard the object enter. She only noticed a shower of glass and metal inside the car.

“The parking lot attendants told me it was right in there,” she said, indicating the plate in the back seat of the car. “Then I really got hysterical.”

Lockley ruled out any possibility that the incident was intentional, but said the plate would be sent to a crime laboratory to determine what it is and where it came from.