Freeway Shootings Share Similar Traits but Seem to Be Unrelated

More than four months after the violence began, detectives believe the freeway shootings that have shaken drivers from the north San Fernando Valley to Riverside are unrelated, but some general patterns are beginning to emerge.

Most of the victims are males and many are young, in their 20s or 30s. The shootings often occur near high-crime areas beset with gang activity. Some detectives believe many of the assailants may be gang members who settle even minor disputes with a weapon.

The 24 Southland shootings since March 12, which have left four men dead, also diverge in important respects: They happen at all hours of the day and night. The victims are racially diverse and, for the most part, they have no criminal records.

Although detectives say they have strong leads in a few of the cases, no arrests have been made. Nothing in the victims’ backgrounds so far gives clues to their assailants’ identities, detectives said.

“Gang members tend to be the ones armed and willing to shoot at some unsuspecting driver in disputes, be it on the street or freeway,” said Det. Sal LaBarbera of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Detectives said they didn’t believe the shootings were gang crimes per se, but rather acts of road rage by those for whom violence is a normal reaction to the merest slight.

“Certainly in some of these cases, there is gang crime in the surrounding neighborhoods,” LaBarbera said.

The southeast Los Angeles-area detective said he didn’t know whether gender was a factor, but only one of the victims that he was aware of was female. And she was a passenger in a car driven by a man.

“It goes with most of our homicides,” LaBarbera said. In southeast L.A. this year, he said, “31 of the 33 homicide victims are males.”

The freeway shootings have come in clusters, police said. South Los Angeles County has been the site of at least eight shootings along the Long Beach, Century, San Diego and Harbor freeways. The Harbor Freeway was the scene of two fatalities. Three shootings, including one fatality, occurred in Tustin in Orange County.

The spate started in that city on March 12 with the fatal shooting of a 26-year-old Fontana man on the Costa Mesa Freeway. The next shooting came 17 days later in South Los Angeles. The pace soon picked up, with four shootings reported from April 30 to May 4.

And early Sunday, an incident near a freeway interchange -- but not on a freeway -- claimed the life of a San Bernardino County teenager.

Freddie Santoyo, 18, of Fontana was shot to death and his passenger wounded as they approached the Cherry Avenue onramp to Interstate 10 in his hometown. The shooters may have been involved in an earlier road rage incident with the victims or a fight at a convenience store, police said.

Freeway shootings appear to be on about the same pace as last year, when 36 were reported in the city of Los Angeles, the California Highway Patrol said. Only one of those resulted in a death.

Two of this year’s shootings followed clear-cut altercations. A 16-year-old boy fired upon on a freeway in Sun Valley in April reportedly had exchanged gestures with a gunman beforehand. A June 13 shooting on the Long Beach Freeway was preceded by a confrontation at a nightclub, authorities said. The driver was shot in the head after being pursued by at least three cars.

But in many cases, there was no warning sign before bullets flew. Willie Burks said the only thing he saw or heard was a “pow” and the driver’s window shattering when his friend, James Wiggins, was killed April 13 on the Harbor Freeway near the Redondo Beach Boulevard exit. Wiggins was a car trader returning from a junkyard. At 47, he was one of the few older victims.

The motive in many of the shootings is hard to even guess at, investigators said. Shots have been fired at a food delivery truck and an ambulance.

“Some of them are gang-related, some of them are road rage and some of them we will never know the motive until we catch the suspect,” said CHP Assistant Chief Art Acevedo.

Acevedo said shootings happen so fast, victims don’t know where the gunfire is coming from, or sometimes even that they have been hit, until they stop and check their vehicles.

By then, key evidence such as shell casings could already be damaged by the movement of the vehicles.

“We had a shooting recently on the 105 [Freeway] and an off-duty CHP officer was right nearby, and all he heard was the shots,” LaBarbera said.

A few cases have yielded ballistics evidence, giving detectives hope of a relatively quick solution, they said. The LAPD ballistics team specializes in analyzing shell casings and matching them to casings recovered in other shootings.

The CHP, which is teaming with local agencies to investigate the freeway shooting cases, has brought in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives’ special mobile firearms analysis unit.

Shell casings were recovered from the scene of the March 29 shooting death of Michael Livingston, a 20-year-old student at West Los Angeles College, who was killed on the northbound Harbor Freeway.

A witness described a gray or dark 1996 Lincoln Town Car leaving the area.

Investigators are working on the case with gang expert officers and prosecutors in the hard-core gang unit.

“We are working on some good leads,” said LAPD Det. Vic Corrella. “These freeway shootings are tough cases. But I believe we are going to solve this one.”

LAPD detectives also may be able to tie Wiggins’ slaying to a previous incident in the harbor area of Los Angeles, they said.

In the other shootings, law enforcement agencies still are shaking their heads.

“We’re still working on it, but I have not had many leads on it at this point,” said Riverside Police Det. Ron Sanfilippo. He is investigating the shooting death of Ricky Smith, 32, who was killed April 22 on the Pomona Freeway near its interchange with Interstate 215 and the Riverside Freeway.

Tustin police detectives also said they have few leads. “We’ve got a whole lot of nothing going on in all of them,” said Sgt. Mark Hein.

“We got a generic description of the car, but unless that spurs someone into calling, that doesn’t do a lot for us,” Hein said of a May 17 tire shooting.

Acevedo said previous freeway shootings have been solved when a victim or witness jotted down a license plate number or provided a specific description of the shooter.

In a recent Orange County case, officers took a driver into custody after an eyewitness reported that the driver had brandished a gun at another motorist.

“When people think they see anyone [driving] in a bizarre manner,” Acevedo said, “it may not be a bad idea to jot a license number down.”