Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Murder on 580:The Understatement of a Freeway Sign

It's funny in that unusual way just how much import you can get from a Freeway status sign. It's more what it doesn't say.

Tuesday we were driving North on Interstate 80 (technically it is 80 West but it was on that weirdo area where you are simultaneously on 80 West and 580 East, but you're actually going North.

Wait stop, it was before that on 880 North, and the Highway status sign just simply said

Richmond Bridge / 580 Westbound Closed
Use Alternate Bridges

[Fortunately we weren't going to be going as far as the bridge but...]

WHAT?! It's 6pm rush hour what are they doing construction for? Wait it said nothing about construction. Uh oh. Dive for the radio and put it on KCBS News.

As if it was answering my direct question (which felt completely spooky), it immediately said that someone using a shotgun has shot two people at the Richmond Bridge toll plaza, at least one of them a toll taker and the other waiting in a parked nearby truck. The suspect has fled in a Western Eagle shuttle van. The police do not think this was random. They then make brief mention of the systematic brutality of the crime.

I said to Terri that this is about Love (well its darker side). My theory was that this was an estranged lover angry at his ex and her new beau. I was half right. The breakup was correct, though there is no new beau. Given that the article says that the guy was shot first and then the shooter tracked down his ex-girlfriend, I'm pretty convinced that the shooter thought they were an item.

Here's one reference to this distressing news:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/12/BAOS197I28.DTL

The video has an interview with an eyewitness. I'm glad I'm not her though it makes me want to travel all the time with a video camera with a long zoom.

The shooter is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He fled in an easily identifiable van and never changed cars. The highway patrol found him over in the Sierras still on the highway.

But I'm brought back by how much that freeway sign told me. It basically said in so many words, there is some very unusual, serious sh*t going down.

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