Driver Found Slain in Vehicle Beside Freeway : Crime: Police close Corona del Mar Freeway for seven hours during investigation. They find a handgun but no suspect.

COSTA MESA — Police closed the Corona del Mar Freeway for seven hours Saturday and canvassed a neighborhood near South Coast Plaza in search of a passenger who apparently fled after shooting a driver to death on the freeway.

The suspect in the pre-dawn slaying remained at large Saturday, and police had few clues about his identity. The shooting took place on the Corona del Mar Freeway, near the San Diego Freeway overpass, said Costa Mesa Police Capt. Tom Lazar.

The California Highway Patrol got a call around 5 a.m. that a maroon Plymouth Voyager with California license plates was abandoned on the right shoulder of the freeway’s northbound lanes.

Slumped at the wheel was 18-year-old Viet Duy Hoang Nguyen of Westminster, dead from “multiple gunshot wounds,” Lazar said. Found at the scene was a handgun police believe to be the weapon used in the slaying.

The suspect apparently was a passenger in the van, but investigators said they are confused about the circumstances that led to the shooting.

Lazar said he could not speculate about how the passenger shot the driver without causing the van to crash, or if the van was stopped at the time of the shooting.

“We can’t identify any specific motive at this time,” Lazar said.

Hoping the gun and other physical evidence in the van would retain the suspect’s scent, police brought in a team of bloodhounds.

Police let the dogs wander the freeway, sniffing bushes at the edge of the road and in the neighborhood between the freeway and South Coast Plaza’s Crystal Court.

“That’s one of the reasons we kept the freeway shut down,” Lazar said. “To see if these dogs could take us in any particular direction, to try and find the suspect.

“It didn’t work out for us, but at least we gave it a try.”

Neighbors on those same quiet streets had another horrifying crime committed on the highway above their well-kept back yards.

Saturday’s shooting took place very near the spot where Denise Huber, a 23-year-old waitress from Newport Beach, was abducted in 1991 after her car broke down on the freeway. The Huber case remained unsolved until last summer, when her body was found in the freezer of an Arizona handyman. Holly Moyer, who lives on one of the streets where police concentrated their search Saturday, said she was pulling weeds in her garden when she heard sirens at 7 a.m..

Better to hear sirens, she said, than gunshots.

When she saw police officers combing through her neighbors’ yards, she worried about someone hiding on her property.

“I didn’t know what was going on, so (the police) came and checked the yard for me,” she said.

Early in the day, neighbors heard a broadcast report that police were searching for a suspect with a white canvas bag who fled the scene on foot.

Lazar said a witness did see such a man near the van, but the timing was wrong to consider him a suspect.

“A person that was driving by saw someone like that,” Lazar said. “But we can’t specifically say he is a suspect, because he was seen much later than the first person (saw) the van stopped along the roadway.”

The van was spotted shortly after 5 a.m.; the man with the white canvas bag was seen around 6.

Lazar said police are hoping someone saw something suspicious nearer to the time of the shooting, but they will listen to any leads within a three-hour time frame.

“We’re looking for anybody who might have seen any activity there, say, between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m.,” Lazar said. “We’d take a telephone call.”