Commuter Sees Big Story Fly Past and End Violently on the Roadside

For a police reporter, some of life’s most agonizing times are spent racing to a crime scene.

As I drive from the newsroom to the site of a calamity I fear that eyewitnesses are leaving, depriving me of the chance to capture some of the best descriptions of what happened.

But on Friday the scene came to me. Actually, it cruised slowly past me in a red Volkswagen Cabriolet.

At 2:45 p.m. I was an eyewitness to the dramatic freeway confrontation between California Highway Patrol officers and a murder suspect who had led them on a 300-mile chase.

While driving my Honda Civic to work, my mind was on the rain-slick southbound San Diego Freeway in Westminster when I glanced to my left and saw a KNBC television news helicopter racing along in the gray sky. A second helicopter hovered close behind.

On scanning the lanes in front, I saw there were no other cars for several hundred yards. All traffic was slowed by a bank of CHP cruisers with red lights pulsing and sirens screaming.

Instinctively, I slowed down and drove over to the emergency lane to let them pass. I began to think I must be living right because the knot in my stomach told me I had stumbled onto a good news story.

Suddenly a red Volkswagen Cabriolet with a shattered rear window drove past, followed closely by the CHP. News helicopters began to circle over the San Diego Freeway’s Golden West Street exit.

Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, I reached into my satchel to get a small tape recorder. Holding the microphone to my mouth, I started describing the scene that was rapidly unfolding outside my rain-dotted windshield.

“Southbound 405. At Bolsa Avenue. Quarter to three,” I yelled into the Panasonic, with the sound of CHP sirens and helicopter blades in the background.

“Several CHP. Exit to Little Saigon. Following a red Volkswagen Cabriolet with a white top.”

The Cabriolet pulled slowly onto the off-ramp and stopped past a large bush, about 150 feet away and beyond my view.

A CHP cruiser pulled along my car. The officer inside waved at me to stay behind him. I did. Close behind.

“I count at least five Highway Patrol cars,” I dictated from my car. The cruisers pulled to a stop on the off-ramp. Their car doors blew open and about 10 officers scampered out and began to surround the stopped car.

I hopped out of my Honda Civic with a notebook and a ballpoint pen clenched in my teeth, a habit I’m trying to break.

To my right, beyond an open drain, a chain-link fence and a stretch of ice plant, a growing crowd of people flowed from the adjacent parking lot of Westminster Mall. They stood still, their faces turned in the direction of the Cabriolet.

A CHP officer on the off-ramp saw me and waved at me hurriedly. “Stay back. We’ve got a crime scene. We’ve got a guy with a gun,” he said.

His description made my pulse race. I was trying to figure out how I could get closer to the action--but I did not have time.

Like a string of firecrackers, a CHP officer’s gun popped a dozen times. I crouched down and jotted some notes.

I looked around and saw Times photographer Aurelio Jose Barrera. “Did you hear that?” he asked excitedly before he went to his car phone to call the city desk.

I raced down to the fence and craned my neck to get a look at the shooting scene.

Several officers swarmed around the car. On a white seat lay a man who authorities said was a murderer and who led the CHP on a chase that came to an end in Westminster when the car apparently ran out of gas.

With little grace, I scaled the 6-foot fence and landed on the muddy plants below. With my press pass in one hand, I approached the growing crowd in the parking lot to try to get a description of the critical moments I did not see.

Two men who were about to drive away stopped to tell me what they saw: Two officers approached the car slowly before opening fire on the man inside, they said.

Before officers covered the car with yellow tarpaulin, I ran back to the fence and looked past the open passenger door of the bullet-ridden Volkswagen.

“Ever see a dead body before?” a newspaper photographer asked me as he stood nearby, focusing his camera.

I had, I told him, but never one with so many wounds. The shirtless suspect was slumped back in a white seat, his left arm dangling out the driver’s window while his head rested on his right shoulder.

After scribbling more notes, I went back to the growing crowd to talk to more witnesses.

About an hour later, with mud-caked tennis shoes, I slogged into the Times newsroom, where the television was showing an interview with a woman who was also an eyewitness to the crime scene.

I can finally say I know what that experience is like.