THE HUMAN CONDITION / WHY SOME OF US TAKE FLIGHT : Feckless Freeway Fliers

When a maroon Ford Escort was forced to a stop on a San Fernando Valley freeway this week, it ended a dramatic 180-mile chase--at speeds of 95 m.p.h.--that kept a big audience riveted for hours.

The California Highway Patrol’s pursuit of the car starting in Barstow, and of the suspected kidnaper at the wheel, was played as a big story on TV and radio. It was high-speed, long-distance and involved several freeways. Most important, the coverage was live.

Interrupting regular programming to show a freeway flight in progress is fairly new. But the live coverage hasn’t illuminated what makes people hit the freeways and take off, even with police cars clearly visible in their rearview mirrors. But such chases certainly do pique the curiosity, all the more because they’re like little movies, with a beginning, middle and end--as well as plenty of running time for the audience to wonder about motivation.

The motive may be very simple: “These people are not operating at a logical level,” says CHP spokesman Steve Kohler, in Sacramento. Leading such a chase isn’t normal, of course, like speeding or even reckless driving. Most people wouldn’t take off down a freeway, cops on their tails. It is not a rational thing to do, even on a lark or as a prank.

Those who do usually have done something wrong. The first of the recent spate of locally televised freeway fliers last January shot another motorist near Los Banos, stole his car and was pursued for 300 miles south at up to 75 m.p.h., until he ran out of fuel in Orange County and was shot dead. The next, in February, tried to rob a cabbie, then stole the cab and led the CHP, at speeds up to 100 m.p.h., from Bakersfield to Los Angeles until he finally left the freeways and was captured in a dead-end alley--under a virtual canopy of TV helicopters.

The Barstow flier, an Arizona man named Charles Edwards, had a woman passenger who told a gas station attendant that she was being kidnaped.

Other freeway fliers have just had too much to drink or are on drugs.

“I think people who get into pursuit situations are in an altered state of awareness,” says Martin Reiser, chief psychologist for the Los Angeles Police Department. “They’re not clicking on all cylinders, perhaps because of situational factors like a crime or a high-stress situation.”

Whatever their motivation, they conclude that their the choice is fight or flight, and they pick flight. Within that framework, a freeway is an eminently rational choice.

“There’s a perception that the freeways are wide-open conduits,” Reiser says. “There are no stoplights, no restraints. There’s the illusion of speed.”

Traffic snarls and pursuing police cars are certainly obstacles, but freeway fliers seem undaunted. They weave in and out of traffic. They change freeways suddenly; they exit them; they enter them again.

They’re not necessarily fast, just unstoppable. One of the CHP’s longer pursuits involved a fellow who took his pursuers from Ventura to the Mexican border.

“He was in a VW and never went more than 45 m.p.h.,” says Kohler. “He just wouldn’t yield. Logically, there’s no really good reason not to yield. We have the resources to keep after them and it’s only a matter of time.”

“It’s one of those situations in life in which the easiest thing is to persist in an ongoing behavior,” says Marvin Karno, head of social psychiatry at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. “Like when people keep going at the blackjack table even though they’re losing. They keep thinking they’ll slip through a hole in the traffic to freedom.”

They have reason to think they’ll get through: Extended chases are a movie tradition, and if the pursued is the hero, he gets through. Stuntmen and special effects have come a long way since “Smokey and the Bandit,” but the more spectacular the obstacles, the more spectacular the escapes.

There’s “a lot of modeling for this kind of fantasy and denial,” says Karno. Against all reason, he says, the freeway fliers “just have a sense of continuing mobility, a sense they can drive off forever, like Thelma and Louise, who end up in mid-air.” Why worry about wiping out if one can remain eternally suspended in disbelief?

This is, of course, “total denial, with a couple of hundred horsepower helping them on,” says Karno.

Live coverage aside, high-speed freeway chases are neither new nor on the increase. For some years, their number has probably “been quite steady,” says Kohler, “but like freeway violence, the intense scrutiny makes it seem like more.” And if there seem to be more in the Los Angeles area, he adds, it’s only because there are more TV helicopters here.

So far, the chance to appear on television live doesn’t seem to be the attraction of freeway flying. The fliers have been people for whom escape--or maybe just flight--is the goal, and they’re thinking of little else. Their “senses aren’t functioning the same way,” says Reiser. “They’re probably not even aware of the (TV) helicopters. They’re not using all their cognitive abilities.”

But others are watching the dailies, the prime-time airing and the reruns, and the chase might seem entertaining. At the CHP, says southern division spokesman Esmeralda Leos in Glendale, it has certainly been “one of our concerns that somebody’s going to want to become a movie star.”