2 Get $25,000 Reward in Arrest of Freeway Shooter

Two Northridge residents collected $25,000 from Los Angeles County on Tuesday for racing along the Golden State Freeway last July at speeds up to 100 m.p.h. to read the license number of a car whose driver had fired a shot at them.

The information provided by Carol Fayne, 56, a Northridge housewife, and Michael Fabian Smith, 36, a friend riding with her, eventually led to the conviction of Lewis L. Meeks, 32, an unemployed Sylmar carpenter.

The wooly ride, however, was only the first difficult step toward collecting the reward, established by the Board of Supervisors last summer during a series of freeway shootings.

Fayne’s attorney threatened to sue before the county agreed to give the two applicants $25,000, the full amount of the reward. He said Fayne and Fabian were entitled to the full sum because they were the only ones who applied for the reward.

In May, when Fayne appeared before the county Reward Review Committee, she was told that part of the fund might be reserved in the event others came forward with information on other freeway shootings.

“When I went to find out about it, nobody wanted to give us the time of day,” Fayne said of the county bureaucracy. “It was a big mess.”

Fayne said she is happy to receive the reward and to have helped get her assailant off the streets. Meeks was sentenced in March to seven years in prison on one count each of assault with a deadly weapon and firing at an occupied vehicle.

“I’m just glad the man is in prison,” Fayne said. “My children and a lot of other people drive the freeways. We consider ourselves extremely fortunate the bullets didn’t hit us.”

Fayne said she would donate some of her reward to the Ronald McDonald House charity and use the rest to pay for her son ‘s medical bills.

Smith was out of town and could not be reached.