Driver of Pickup Killed by Gunfire From Car on I-5

An Anaheim man driving on Interstate 5 (Santa Ana Freeway) in Orange was killed early Sunday by a motorist who pulled alongside his pickup truck and opened fire with a semiautomatic assault rifle, police said.

Juan Trujillo, 22, was driving home from a restaurant with his brother and a cousin about 3:30 a.m. when he was struck in the upper body by one of several shots fired from a blue Oldsmobile sedan with tinted windows, Orange Police Sgt. Mike Pollok said.

Trujillo had just made the transition from the Garden Grove Freeway when the late-model Oldsmobile pulled alongside his truck, Pollok said.

“The victim’s vehicle came to a stop” after the shots, Pollok said. The Oldsmobile sped north on the freeway.

The wounded man’s relatives drove him to their Anaheim home, where paramedics were summoned. Trujillo was pronounced dead at UC Irvine Medical Center, Pollok said.

Police had no motive for the shooting. “This appears to be random as there was no traffic altercation involved,” Pollok said.

The shooting was reminiscent of a rash of more than 50 such incidents on Southern California roadways in the summer of 1987 in which five people died and 16 were wounded.

The freeway shooting prompted some motorists to chose other routes for fear of being attacked on freeways in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.

The spate of roadway crimes included a number of intimidating incidents in which irate motorists played on the fears of others by merely brandishing weapons on the freeway.

Just as spontaneously as the random attacks began, they ceased in March, 1988.

In September, authorities briefly feared that the woundings of five people in three freeway shootings in one week would spark another series of attacks.