Freeway Violence Hits a Nerve

It was two days into a standard L.A. summer, which is to say the Dodgers were winning up at Dodger Stadium and a brush fire was burning down below Dodger Stadium.

And the freeway. Ten o’clock on a Sunday night, and of course something was amiss on the freeway.

Noonday, midnight, Easter Sunday or payday Friday, something is almost always wrong on the freeway. A fender-bender, a SigAlert, box springs or Coachella grapefruit in the fast lane--those disruptions we expect.

But as a witness would later put it, “It’s really unusual to see somebody standing there”--there, at the edge of the northbound Pasadena Freeway, near the exit to Chavez Ravine, jammed with Dodger fans a few hours before.

He was unshaven, wearing jeans and a blue shirt. He was throwing stuff onto the freeway.

A chunk of concrete got Angel Ramos’ red Geo Storm, a glancing blow that pranged the right fender. Ramos drove on home, but went back to find a cop when his son came in and told him about the big mess on the freeway.

A plastic orange-and-white traffic sawhorse barricade got Antonio Moreno’s 13-year-old Monte Carlo, banging up the grille and cracking the headlight rim. Moreno had flashed his high beams and honked to warn the unshaven man off, but drew his attention instead.

How long the man had stood pitching things at cars no one knows, but by about 10 o’clock, when Ronal Carballo was driving his wife Rosa home from work, the man at the freeway’s edge had evidently run out of orange plastic cones and white traffic sawhorses, and picked up a large, smooth rock.

I know those rocks. Anyone who has lived near the cemented riverbank that is the Arroyo Seco, from downtown to Pasadena, knows those rocks. For generations they have been piled up into decorative walls and plastered into bungalow porch pillars. Charles Lummis, the editor and ethnologist, dredged them up from the arroyo and built his house of them. They are river rocks, relics of the once-living arroyo, water-tumbled to the smoothness and regularity of a softball.

Witnesses would later adjudge that the river rock that came through the windshield of the Carballos’ red Toyota pickup was somewhere between baseball and cantaloupe size.

It was enough. By the time Ronal Carballo pulled the truck over, Rosa was bleeding. The rock lay at her feet. It had knocked out five teeth, cracked her jaw, sliced open her lip. In the weeks since, she has taken her meals through a straw.

Cars get dinged and crunched every day. Jaws get broken every day. Heck, people are murdered every day. What brings this, five felony counts’ worth, into court?

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In the summer of ‘87, more people drowned than were shot to death on Southern California freeways. Yet it was, notoriously, the Year of the Freeway Shooting, when guns, anonymity, freeways and tempers achieved critical mass.

It was also the summer the Pope came to town. So vivid were the freeway shooting headlines that then-Archbishop Roger Mahony--the same Roger Mahony who as cardinal nine years later would publicly pray for a 12-year-old Whittier boy critically wounded in a freeway shooting--pleaded for drivers to “leave your impatience and anger . . . [and] guns at home.”

In urban legend and urban fact, we are bound up in our freeways: The Freeway Killer. Traffic every six minutes. The murderer whose fame is that he may have buried his wife’s body in the concrete of a new freeway onramp. The booster’s lie that a freeway trip to anywhere in L.A. takes only 20 minutes.

More than parks, more even than malls, freeways are the one public space everyone shares, Pintos and Beamers, the limoed elite and the mass transit masses.

So a freeway shooting is a greater psychic violation than a backyard shooting, and freeway rock-throwing a more shocking public trespass. There is even a law for it: 23110(B) of the Vehicle Code, throwing something “capable of doing serious bodily harm at a vehicle and occupant thereof on a highway.”

Public defender Peter Swarth’s client, who faces trial on five felonies in the freeway free-for-all, is a man more plagued by a mental health record than a criminal one. Swarth thinks this is a matter for mental and not criminal judgment. Yet he is not unsympathetic; after the two years he spent in Juvenile Court, where clients find dropping rocks from freeway overpasses to be a fine sport, he cannot drive beneath an overpass without glancing up.

Psychologists have likened freeway traffic to video games. Thousands of little wheeled steel and fiberglass boxes create a depersonalizing unreality that makes a freeway shooting seem about as real as an arcade game.

Of course a freeway is unreal. We have to suspend reality in order to get behind the wheel and onto the roadway among thousands of tons of like-shaped steel and fiberglass, moving past or opposite or ahead at speeds that, from a standstill, look like madness.