2 teens arrested in Virginia highway shootings

A manhunt for shooters whose potshots at passing cars shut down a mountain highway ended Friday when authorities stormed a central Virginia farm.

Investigators said they thought the shootings, which slightly injured two drivers, were part of a long night of random gunfire in which a 19-year-old former high school athlete, who has a record of making trouble, and a 16-year-old also shot at a credit union and a residence.

“Everyone can, I think, rest compared to the state that we were in overnight,” State Police Supt. Steven Flaherty said at a news conference in Charlottesville.

Slade Allen Woodson of Afton was charged in the shootings at the home and the credit union early Thursday, as well as the Interstate 64 shootings, which stirred memories of the Washington-area sniper shootings six years ago that killed 10 people.

Authorities also charged the 16-year-old, a Crozet resident whose name was not released.

Besides Woodson’s charges in the building shootings, he and the other teen were charged with two felony counts of malicious wounding, one count of attempted malicious wounding, two counts of the use of a firearm in a felony and five counts of maliciously shooting at an occupied vehicle.

They were being held pending bond hearings scheduled for Monday.

Police declined to offer a possible motive in the highway shootings, which began early Thursday in central Virginia.

According to police, authorities took a call minutes after midnight from a driver in a car that had been shot. In the hours that followed, gunshots hit another car, a van, a tractor-trailer and an unoccupied dump truck.

Between midnight and 2 a.m. Thursday, shots also were fired at the credit union and a residence in Waynesboro.

Investigators shut down a 20-mile stretch of I-64 between Waynesboro and Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia, reopening it around dawn.

Surveillance video at the credit union captured a light-colored AMC Gremlin around the time shots were fired there. Police found the car Thursday afternoon, abandoned along a road.

Authorities determined that Woodson owns a vehicle similar to the car in the video and accelerated a manhunt that ended in the predawn raid Friday.