Freeway Shots Strike at Heart of Fear

The victims were women she had never met, but for a few nervous minutes Sunday night Amber Lindsay couldn’t say that with certainty.

Lindsay saw media reports that two women had been shot while driving along Southland freeways, one of them in a white vehicle traveling the 7th Street offramp from the northbound San Diego Freeway in Seal Beach.

One of Lindsay’s daughters drives a white vehicle. She could easily have been driving that stretch of freeway, Lindsay thought as she watched televised news updates.

“It made me really nervous,” said Lindsay, 52, of Huntington Beach. “I was very concerned until I saw the [victim’s] car on TV.”

Such are the links between the random and the specific, and the flights of a mother’s imagination.

On both sides of the San Diego Freeway, people who live and work in Seal Beach wrestled with a foreign concept: Gunfire near their homes and jobs, along their own commute routes. They were discomforting thoughts, made all the more so by a lack of concrete information.

Officials from the Seal Beach Police and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s departments said Monday they were continuing their investigations into the shootings, which took place at 12:40 a.m. and 1:20 a.m. Sunday.

While police said they had few leads, they planned to match notes to find possible links between the Seal Beach shooting, in which Helena Joyce Dobiesz, 55, of Long Beach, was shot in the head and fatally injured, and the earlier wounding of Melody Spicer, 47, who was shot in the back as she traveled south on a transition road from the San Gabriel Freeway to the Artesia Freeway in Cerritos.

Spicer was listed in fair condition Sunday. A spokeswoman for Long Beach Memorial Medical Center said Monday that Spicer had asked that no further information on her condition be released.

The shootings were the first and recurrent topics of conversation Monday morning at the Dal-Je Coiffure beauty salon at Seal Beach Boulevard and Westminster Avenue, just south of the San Diego Freeway and not far from the fatal shooting.

The discussions weren’t among the customers, who hail primarily from nearby Leisure World and tend to avoid the freeways, but among the staff--mostly single women who often find themselves driving the freeways alone, Lindsay said.

“The most concerning thing is that they don’t know why,” Lindsay said. “We don’t know if there are two ding-dongs out there, or just one ding-dong upset about women in white cars.”

Carlene Garten, 52 of Huntington Beach, rarely rides the freeways, commuting to her job at Dal-Je along Westminster Avenue. But she and her husband had gone out for dinner Saturday night, and drove home along the San Diego Freeway less than an hour before the shooting.

The timing, she said, left her shaken.

“I thought, ‘My God, that’s just where I came from,’ ” Garten said as fellow beauticians worked on a steady stream of customers. “It’s just a very uneasy feeling. Shock. Disbelief that it happened so close, in an area that we frequent.”

In College Park, just north of where the killing occurred, Pat Dellinger and Ginny Castellano, neighbors for more than 30 years, stood in the bright splash of a winter sun and talked about what they didn’t hear early Sunday morning.

No gunshots. No police sirens. No wail from an ambulance. Whenever a car rolls off the freeway the hullabaloo wakes the neighborhood. Yet the killing happened amid relative silence.

“It’s awfully close,” Castellano said.

There’s only one way into College Park, built in 1966 along the eastern edge of the San Gabriel River but closed off from the rest of Seal Beach by 7th Street and the San Diego and San Gabriel River freeways interchange.

The thought that the route home might now be more dangerous, threatened by anonymous violence, had Dellinger thinking about her already detailed personal security plans.

“I try not to travel that late at night by myself,” she said.

Dellinger, who teaches at Cypress College, follows the same route every day. That way, if something goes wrong and she’s late, her husband will know where to come looking for her.

“But I’m thinking about car problems,” Dellinger said, letting the fresh alternative hang unspoken in the air.

That uncertainty lurks behind discussions of the shootings. At the beauty salon, Garten--like Lindsay--talked of her adult daughter who is single and often travels the freeways alone. General concerns over the young woman’s safety, she said, have suddenly developed into a palpable fear.

Yet those emotions have a broader base, and a broader range, Lindsay said. The immediate point might be the shooting of two women on two freeways, but those events, she said, are part of a wide range of violence, both real and perceived.

Lindsay goes to church and has tried to instill in her family a creed of nonviolence. But then, she said, she sees her 4-year-old grandson mimicking gunmen as he plays. They are games learned form outside the house, through other children or cartoons or television.

The influences are hard to barricade against, she said.

“We should be able to have a sense of safety, and there is no sense of safety, no matter where you live or what your background is,” said Lindsay, standing behind the reception counter at the salon, the front of her sweatshirt bearing a picture of Elmo from “Sesame Street” and drinking a cup of hot cocoa. “I hate to think that we’re getting [to] the point where we’re living in an atmosphere of fear.”

She talked more about the nature of fear, and its effects. El Nino is coming and the rains begin so people stay home. Someone is shot so customers avoid a neighborhood. People shrink from confrontations and interactions, not knowing what they might lead to in a culture that decries violence on the one hand but sells tickets to with the other.

“I hate to think that this absence of morality has that kind of power over us,” Lindsay said as she rang up a customer. “We’re not a victim, but we’ve created a victim mentality. We’re being held captive to our own fears. You just kind of wonder what’s ahead.

“But you have to think positively, because if you don’t, you do get paranoid.”