Woman Driver Stopped at Signal Slain by Gunman

Hertesene McDowell was making final preparations for a cross-country car trip to Chicago with her husband when her granddaughter called.

“Ganny, my mother’s been shot,” 8-year-old Kristen Hutchinson said.

McDowell rushed to 131st Street and Towne Avenue and learned that her daughter, Dorthea Hutchinson, 32, had been shot while driving home with Kristen.

Hutchinson had stopped for a traffic signal about a block from her home when she was shot in the head Tuesday evening, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said. She died at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center early Wednesday morning.

Deputies said a man walked up to the driver’s door, fired one shot that struck Hutchinson and fled.

Investigators have not determined a motive for the shooting, and no suspects are in custody.

The child was not hurt. She jumped out of the car, which had rolled into a fence after the shooting, and ran to a nearby home to summon help, McDowell said.

“She asked the people to call paramedics, and she then called me,” McDowell said. “When I arrived, she asked me: ‘Ganny, did I do the right thing? My mother always told me to do that if anything ever happened to her.’ ”

Hutchinson, a cosmetology student, was “finally getting her life together and was looking forward to the future with her daughter,” her mother said.

“She had been very happy lately,” said her sister, Anita Abner. “She finally found what she wanted to do.”

Abner said her sister, who had worked in temporary clerical jobs, enrolled in the cosmetology classes earlier this year and “dreamed of opening her own salon one day.” Hutchinson had taken her mother and daughter shopping earlier Tuesday, picking up last-minute items for her mother’s trip, McDowell said.

“We had been planning to leave today,” Hutchinson’s stepfather, J.D. Weathers, said Wednesday. “Now we’re making funeral arrangements.”