SOUTHERN California cops launched a manhunt to nab a road raging gunman who fatally shot a 6-year-old boy in the backseat of a car on his way to school after his mother reportedly flipped him off.
“My wife noticed a lady pulling her son out and dropping to the ground with her son in her arms,” a witness named Reyes Valdivia said.
The grief-stricken woman told him and his wife thaat she “flipped off” the driver of a white sedan after he cut her off in the carpool lane, he told the Orange County Register.
He recalled the woman saying: “I got shot at in the car.”
He said the bullet “went through the boy’s back.”
"There was some type of road-rage incident," California Highway Patrol Officer Florentino Olivera said at a news conference. "Unfortunately, the boy in the back seat was shot."
The deadly shooting occurred at around 8am on Friday along the northbound side of State Route 55 in the city of Orange, about 32 miles from Downtown LA.
The shooter remained outstanding as of Friday evening.
The boy’s mother was described as driving her son to school in a silver Chevrolet Sonic near the Chapman Avenue exit when she said she was cut off by a rogue motorist in a white car.
Reyes Valdivia and his wife had entered onto the freeway having already dropped off their two children at school when they spotted the mother’s car frozen on the shoulder.
The woman said she steered her car to the right and noticed there was a man and woman inside the white sedan, and they pulled behind her and someone fired a gun.
“She heard her child scream and immediately stopped,” Valdivia, remembering what the mother told him, in a separate interview with the Los Angeles Times.
He recalled the woman saying: “I got shot at in the car.”
He said the bullet “went through the boy’s back.”
Images from the freeway crime scene show investigators lined up on foot combing the asphalt for clues.
An image of the mother’s silver Chevy possessed a pierced circular hole in on the left side of the trunk.
Details on the shooter’s vehicle are spare, but it may be a newer model white sedan — possibly a Volkswagen station wagon, according to KTLA.
Friday’s deadly shooting is being classified as an “isolated” road rage.
It's believed to have nothing to do with a string of more than 60 BB gun shootings that police are investigating in Orange, Riverside and Los Angeles counties in the past month, CHP spokesman Olivera explained.
Authorities are hoping someone who may have information on Friday's fatal shooting or the wanted killer will come forward.
“If you were driving by, you saw something that was not right, call it in, even it wasn’t something major, call our office,” Olivera said.
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