2 Escape Unhurt From Freeway Gunmen’s Shots

A West Hills couple escaped injury early Friday when their car was hit twice by gunshots fired from one of two vehicles that boxed them in on the Ventura Freeway in Woodland Hills, police said.

Theresa Rodriguez, 30, and her husband, Alex, 31, were heading home after visiting friends about 3 a.m. when their car was caught between two vehicles that were apparently racing each other, said Los Angeles Police Detective Joel Price.

One of the vehicles, a red Ford Bronco, pulled in front of the couple’s car and abruptly slowed down, Price said. At the same time, a black Corvette drove up next to the Rodriguez’s car, and its passengers began shouting obscenities.

The couple tried to exit the westbound freeway at Shoup Avenue, saw a passenger in the Corvette fire a gun, and heard “a pop and a bang,” Price said. Bullets hit the car and flattened a rear tire.

In another incident, a 19-year-old Westminster man who authorities had thought was killed early Friday in a random shooting on the Foothill Freeway in San Dimas is now believed to have been hit by a shot fired by his own back-seat passenger, authorities said. The passenger, Dai Trung Nguyen, 18, of Pomona was booked for investigation of murder.

California Highway Patrol officials said there is no evidence of a wave of freeway shootings.

Since June, the CHP has counted 183 incidents of freeway violence in the greater Los Angeles area, said Officer Lydia Martinez, a CHP spokeswoman. However, the agency lumps in with more serious incidents reports of less dangerous behavior such as flashing obscene gestures.

Twenty-seven of those incidents involved firearms--anything from waving a gun to shooting it--but only three of the incidents resulted in injuries, Martinez said.

But Sgt. Mike Brey, a CHP spokesman, cautioned that some of the shootings may have been reported to agencies other than the Highway Patrol.

The CHP started compiling statistics in the summer of 1987, when several people were killed in freeway shootings during a four-month span beginning in June, Brey said. Laws were enacted by the Legislature in 1987, adding five years to the prison term of anyone convicted of shooting someone in a motor vehicle.

In the San Dimas incident, five passengers told authorities they were asleep in a car when the driver was shot to death on the Foothill Freeway.

Sheriff’s deputies on Friday afternoon arrested one of the passengers, Dai Trung Nguyen, 18, of Pomona, on suspicion of murder.