2 Motorists Shot in Separate Attacks

Two freeway shootings early Sunday left a Long Beach woman mortally wounded and another woman with a bullet wound in her back, but are apparently unrelated acts of violence, law enforcement officials said.

Helena Joyce Dobiesz, 55, of Long Beach was shot on the 7th Street offramp leading from the northbound San Diego Freeway in Seal Beach.

She was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. but was being kept on life support late Sunday while her family arranged to donate her organs, said Steve Sibilsky, a spokesman for St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, where Dobiesz was taken.

Relatives said they were stunned by the mysterious and apparently senseless nature of the shooting.

“It is all so mad, so shocking,” said Dobiesz’s sister, Kathy Bell of Murietta.

About 1:20 a.m., witnesses saw a four-door white Mazda driven by Dobiesz swerve and crash into a guardrail, Seal Beach Police Sgt. Rick Ransdell said.

Authorities found Dobiesz with a gunshot wound to her head and rushed her to St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, Ransdell said. The bullet apparently came through the left rear window. The car was being examined for any other bullet markings.

Dobiesz, who ran a house-cleaning service from her North Long Beach home, was an avid sculptor and lover of classical music and the arts, Bell said.

In the hours before the shooting, Dobiesz had been doing “some of her favorite things,” Bell said, adding that her sister had visited a museum in Orange County before taking in a movie with a friend Saturday night.

The pair then returned to the friend’s Huntington Beach home for pie and conversation before Dobiesz headed north on the freeway for the short trip home, Bell said.

An unidentified man driving behind Dobiesz as the freeway wound through Seal Beach called 911 from his car when he saw her swerving and slumping in her car, Bell said detectives told her.

Police also said the man reported that he didn’t see the attack or detect anything suspicious in his surroundings, Bell said.

Sunday night, sitting beside Dobiesz’s sculptures, the victim’s family tried to piece together what could have prompted the shooting and whether it could be connected to another freeway attack.

That occurred about 40 minutes before the Seal Beach shooting.

Melody Spicer, 47, was traveling south on a transition road from the San Gabriel River Freeway to the Artesia Freeway when she felt a pain in her back, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Robert Crume said. The woman pulled off the road and used a freeway call box to report that she had been shot and to ask for help.

She was taken to a local hospital and was in fair condition Sunday night.

Citing safety concerns, officials declined to name the community where Spicer lives.

Ransdell said there is no apparent connection between the incidents.

“It doesn’t appear to be correlated at this point in time,” Ransdell said. Nevertheless, investigators were still checking to see if there was any connection.

Dobiesz’s relatives said they doubted that she provoked an attack.

They described Dobiesz as a cautious driver who rarely ventured out of the slow lane and, if anything, avoided confrontations.

“If road rage is involved, I can’t see how,” Bell said.

Dobiesz’s daughter, Cara Marquez, said she hopes someone who was sharing the road with her mother during the attack might have seen or heard something that could help police with an investigation that, so far, has few apparent clues.

“If anybody says they saw something, anything, it’s important they call, even if they think it might not matter,” Marquez said. “We want to see justice. We want this to be solved.”

The Seal Beal Police Department is asking anyone with information about the shooting to call investigators at (562) 799-4107.

The weekend freeway shootings followed another unrelated incident Saturday morning in which a 26-year-old black motorist narrowly escaped serious injury after a white passenger in another car shouted a racial slur and then unloaded six rounds from a .45-caliber handgun into the victim’s car.

The victim, a South Gate man, suffered a graze wound to the ribs but otherwise was unhurt, Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Lynn Nehring said.

The shooting took place about midnight Friday as the victim drove alone west on Los Alisos Boulevard south of Jeronimo Road after visiting his girlfriend in Mission Viejo, Nehring said.

Two white men in their mid-20s, riding in a four-door gray vehicle believed to be a Honda or Nissan, pulled up alongside the driver’s side of the victim’s car. The passenger then shouted a racial slur and opened fire, Nehring said.

Four of the shots passed through the driver’s door and lodged in the passenger seat and passenger door, and a fifth bullet struck the rear fender, Nehring said

Authorities said they had no leads on the identity of the gunman or the other driver.

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Freeway Violence

Two women were shot early Sunday morning in separate incidents that took place about 40 minutes apart. Law enforcement officials said they believe the shootings are unrelated, random acts of violence.

1. The first shooting took place about 12:40 a.m. when a Melody Spicer, 47, driving southon a transition road from the San Gabriel Freeway to the Artesia Freeway was shot in the back. Spicer pulled off the road and used a freeway call box to get help. She was listed in fair condition Sunday.

2. The second shooting took place about 1:20 a.m. on the Seventh Street offramp on the northbound San Diego Freeway in Seal Beach. Helena J. Dobiesz, 55, of Long Beach, was shot in the head and was on life support.

Source: Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and Seal Beach Police.