Carjack Victim Leaps to Safety : Escape: Chatsworth man escapes gunmen by jumping out of his car at 30 m.p.h. along mountain road.

For Jim Voshall, who usually deals with crime from a comfortable distance as a security company telephone operator, it was a shock to have terror climb into his passenger seat.

Shortly after two men forced their way into his car at gunpoint he found himself on his knees, tearfully begging for his life.

And shortly after that, he hurled himself from his own car at 30 m.p.h. on a mountain road, bailing out in a desperate attempt to escape the gunmen who had decided not to kill him “yet.”

In an interview Friday at the offices of Westec Security in Santa Monica where he works, Voshall, 26, recounted his capture by the gunmen as he left the office about 10:45 p.m. Thursday after a long shift, thinking about his girlfriend and his 2-year-old son at home in Chatsworth.

Through the open car window at a stoplight, a man thrust a pistol into his neck and ordered him to open the passenger door for an accomplice, then got into the rear seat.

“Just drive,” they told him. “Just drive,” directing him east on the Santa Monica Freeway, north on the Golden State to the Ventura Freeway, and west to Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Numb, shaking and staring straight ahead, Voshall followed their instructions to head south through the Santa Monica Mountains. There was almost no talk. Appearing lost and irritated when they reached Pacific Coast Highway, he said, the gunman ordered him to turn back into the mountains.

Two miles in, the man with the gun told Voshall to stop. Seeing nowhere to pull off, Voshall put his Honda Accord into park in the middle of the road.

“They said, ‘This is where you get out,’ ” Voshall recalled.

The man with the gun ordered him to walk in front of the car. Then he told Voshall to get down on his knees.

The gunman put the pistol’s muzzle between Voshall’s eyes. “I think we should kill (him),” he said.

Voshall began to cry, he said.

“ ‘Please don’t kill me,’ ” he begged them. “I said, ‘I have a wife and a kid at home, I have a family. I’m too young to die.’ ”

“Death, that’s all that went through my mind,” Voshall said. “I was going to die and my son was going to grow up without a dad . . . A life doesn’t mean anything to them.”

Looking back on it, Voshall said his pleas might have had an affect on the gunman’s associate. “No,” the accomplice told the gunman. “Let’s not kill him yet.”

The accomplice dragged the 5-foot 8-inch Voshall up by his shirt collar and shoved him into the passenger seat. The gunman returned to the back seat and the accomplice drove north on Topanga.

“The word that stuck in my mind was yet ,” Voshall said. “He said, “Let’s not kill him yet. I didn’t want to wait for the yet. “

Voshall planned an escape. He jammed his elbow into the automatic door lock button and inched it up, watching the dashboard for the moment the “door ajar” warning light would flash on.

Just past the high point of Topanga Boulevard, Voshall got his chance. When the driver slowed to about 30 m.p.h., Voshall punched up the lock control, elbowed the door open and pitched forward out the opening, slamming into the pavement and rolling onto the dirt shoulder.

The car sped away, he said. From the safety of the hillside brush in the dark, he watched its headlights move off through the canyon before he climbed back up to the street and searched for help.

As he walked down the center of the unlit highway, Voshall thought about how the Valley had changed since his days as a student at Canoga Park High School. He thought about how lucky he was, he said, and he thought about his son.

A short way away, after trying unsuccessfully to flag down some passing cars, he came across a highway patrol officer.

Santa Monica Police said Friday they had found neither the men nor the white car, license plate “SO CLEAN,” named for the car detailing business that Voshall used to own.

“It makes me want to move out of California,” Voshall said, rubbing the sore right elbow that with some bruises were his only injuries in the jump. “I love California, but I also love living.”

Of criminals like his captors, he said: “We need to get rid of them, send them out of California and take California back.”