MacEachern: Copycat shooters are dangerous too
From the perspective of the person with her windshield blown out -- the person whose 4-year-old still wakes up crying in the middle of the night -- the difference between the official "freeway shooter" and a copycat shooter is, I'm thinking, pretty nearly nil.
Late Friday night, police arrested Leslie Allen Merritt Jr., 21, outside a Glendale Walmart store. booking him on 28 felony charges. The cops clearly think they've got the real freeway shooter, as well as the handgun they believe is the weapon used in at least four of the 11 known shootings.
Two nights earlier, in north Phoenix off of Interstate 17, somebody added another random shooting to the list. Using some kind of pellet gun, the shooter blew out the windshield of a car driven by Martha Ghica as she drove by.
The shooter set it up neatly. Like he had done it before.
He (assuming, of course, that it was a "he") came at Ghica on a quiet road near the Walmart on Happy Valley Road where Ghica had just picked up a prescription. It was between 10 and 11 p.m.The single mom was alone in the car with her three-year-old son, who was sleeping, and her four-year-old daughter, who was awake. No one else was nearby, she said, as the car came toward her with its bright lights on.
Then, as the car neared, the driver dimmed the lights.
"All I could see was an arm outside the window holding something," she told me. "It just seemed odd. I felt like something was about to happen. It was just out of the ordinary. So, I veered."
She heard a "pop-pop" just as the car passed, and as her windshield seemed to explode. "I just reached back, touching my baby in the back seat. I was crying. My daughter was crying. Thank God my son didn't wake up."
Ghica, a home health-care worker, drove to a convenience store parking lot, where she called Phoenix police. "Three big SUVs came up within minutes," she said.
Even now, Ghica is still rattled by the experience. And her daughter, she says, has been waking up crying in the middle of the night. The shock of being shot at still hasn't worn off.
The cops took from her what little she could tell of what she saw. It wasn't much. An older-model car, it seemed to her. Maybe gold in color. Maybe gray. In the night, illuminated by nothing but headlights, it is difficult to say. The cops were professional. An officer did a follow-up over the phone, later. But they all told Ghica there wasn't much to go on. Some kind of projectile hit her windshield, they said. They even suggested it may have been a rock spun out from a tire -- a guess Ghica adamantly rejects. "It wasn't a rock from someone's tire. There wasn't anyone ahead of me."
Whatever it was, it was not a bullet fired from a real gun.
She understood. But she still remains more than a little miffed that they seemed so casual about what had just happened to her.
"I told them, 'You guys don't appreciate what I just went through,' " she said. "I'm a single mom. All I have is my two kids. I was having a panic attack and all they said was go call your insurance company and they'll take care of it."
Our View: Freeway shooter's arrest solves nothing
A natural reaction? Sure. Getting shot at it is a visceral event. You don't get over it quickly. You don't want people to know about what happened to your car. You want people to know -- and appreciate -- what almost happened to you. And to your kids.
In fact, the more Ghica thinks about the casual attitude generally about the freeway shooter and the copycats that have proliferated, the madder she gets.
"I'm seeing people posting things online about it as if it's some kind of joke. It's not a joke. It's nothing to laugh at. My four-year-old should not have to go through that. That's not OK."