Motorist Slain on Angeles Forest Highway

A driver forced a woman in another car off a remote mountain road Friday, stabbed her to death beside the highway and fled in her car, witnesses said.

The attacker screamed obscenities at the woman before lunging at her with a knife, according to witnesses who called 911 from a nearby restaurant.

Authorities disclosed few details about the 2:40 p.m. attack on Angeles Forest Highway in Angeles National Forest between Glendale and Palmdale.

Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies were searching for a reddish or burgundy two-door car, possibly a Saturn or Nissan Altima, said Deputy Joan Raber. The car was last seen traveling toward Palmdale.

Raber said investigators had not identified the victim or the killer.

She said that at least two sets of people witnessed the attack and were expected to be interviewed by detectives at the scene.

The suspect was described only as white, possibly in his 40s, Raber said.

Elva Lewis, owner of the Hidden Springs Cafe, said two men who witnessed the attack called authorities from a phone outside her restaurant, about three miles from where the attack occurred on a desolate stretch of the two-lane forest highway. said they saw a cloud of dust and two cars pulled over on the side of the road, and that the man then initiated the attack. The witnesses told her the attacker also had a gun.

They told her the killer then abandoned the car he had been driving and fled in the woman’s car.

“I don’t think it was random,” she said. “He swore at her when he got out of the car,” a witness told her.

Lewis, who has run the cafe for nearly three decades, said such violence is rare in the almost uninhabited reaches of the national forest.

“Usually people murder somebody down in the city and bring them up here and dump them,” she said. “We’ve never had anything like this happen before.”