OHIO POLICE LINK TWO HIGHWAY SHOOTINGS
Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2003 6:05 am
Ohio Police Link Two Highway Shootings
COLUMBUS, Ohio - It's a nightmare scenario: someone taking potshots at drivers going by a five-mile stretch of highway. One woman is dead, and Mary Hammond isn't risking it.
The 46-year-old and her husband are using back roads to get to work. "I've got two kids to raise," she explained.
Authorities said for the first time Friday they had linked the Nov. 25 death of Gail Knisley to at least one of 10 other reports of shots fired at vehicles along the same highway — and they said the shooting was not an accident. Police won't use the term "sniper," but they say more of the shootings could be connected.
"You just can't believe someone would be sick enough to be shooting at cars," Missi Knisley, Knisley's daughter-in-law, said Friday. "It's a nightmare."
Extra patrols have been assigned to the leg of the highway, but those who live, work and travel through the area are nervous.
"We're living in a bad time," acknowledged Helen Speakman, who lives near the highway.
She said she won't be bullied into changing her routine.
"You never know what's going to happen, no matter where you live," she said, speaking through her storm door.
The first reported shooting on the southern section of Interstate 270 or in its immediate area was in May. A second occurred in August and the rest have been in the last seven weeks. The shots have been fired at different times of day, piercing trucks, cars, vans and pickups, shattering windows and flattening tires — and killing Knisley. The vehicles hit include a UPS delivery truck, a Coca-Cola truck and a horse trailer.
No one besides Knisley has been injured in the shootings.
Authorities have released few details, saying only that tests on the bullets connected two shootings and declining to speculate on the type of weapon. Police did not identify the shooting linked to Knisley's.
Authorities on Friday asked whoever is responsible to call the sheriff's office.
Chief Deputy Steve Martin also advised the public to watch for changes in the behavior of friends and relatives and note if someone is missing work or appointments, shows excessive interest in the shootings or changes appearance.
It's unclear whether there is one shooter or more, Martin said.
He said authorities have received more than 150 tips. Department crime analysts also are reviewing this year's vandalism reports to see if any fit the pattern, police spokesman Sgt. Brent Mull said.
The stretch of highway in question runs through a sparsely populated area that includes woods frequented by hunters and people practicing target shooting and a few residential neighborhoods.
Knisley, a homemaker who lived about 40 miles away from Columbus, didn't like to drive in the city and was being chauffeured Tuesday by her friend Mary Cox. After Knisley's checkup following minor surgery on skin cancer lesions on her nose, the two had planned to go to lunch and go Christmas shopping.
They were talking when they heard a pop.
"What was that? What was that?" Knisley, 62, said before slumping forward, according to the recording of Cox's 911 call.
Hours later, a GMC Jimmy was hit nearby, deputies said. The same day a tractor-trailer driver for Coca-Cola Co. found a hole in the rear door of the trailer after making deliveries along I-270.
Four days earlier, Edward Cable was headed home to southern Ohio when he heard a noise in his minivan. He found a bullet hole and shell fragment about 16 inches behind the driver's seat.
Trucker William Briggs was hauling two empty trailers back from Roanoke, Va., about 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 19 when his driver's side window exploded.
Briggs had just entered I-270 from U.S. 23 and was in the center of the three westbound lanes. He kept driving, assuming he had been hit by a rock, and turned on his dome light to search for the stone but couldn't find it. A few minutes later, stopped at a truck terminal, he discovered the bullet.
"It didn't miss my face but a couple of inches at most," said Briggs, a Vietnam veteran from suburban Hilliard. "It was really luck on my part and ineptness on his part."
Briggs drove past the site of his shooting the next night and says he isn't afraid to travel the outerbelt.
"They didn't get me over there, they're not going to get me here," he said, referring to Vietnam. "Being shot at once — the odds are astronomical it's going to happen twice."
COLUMBUS, Ohio - It's a nightmare scenario: someone taking potshots at drivers going by a five-mile stretch of highway. One woman is dead, and Mary Hammond isn't risking it.
The 46-year-old and her husband are using back roads to get to work. "I've got two kids to raise," she explained.
Authorities said for the first time Friday they had linked the Nov. 25 death of Gail Knisley to at least one of 10 other reports of shots fired at vehicles along the same highway — and they said the shooting was not an accident. Police won't use the term "sniper," but they say more of the shootings could be connected.
"You just can't believe someone would be sick enough to be shooting at cars," Missi Knisley, Knisley's daughter-in-law, said Friday. "It's a nightmare."
Extra patrols have been assigned to the leg of the highway, but those who live, work and travel through the area are nervous.
"We're living in a bad time," acknowledged Helen Speakman, who lives near the highway.
She said she won't be bullied into changing her routine.
"You never know what's going to happen, no matter where you live," she said, speaking through her storm door.
The first reported shooting on the southern section of Interstate 270 or in its immediate area was in May. A second occurred in August and the rest have been in the last seven weeks. The shots have been fired at different times of day, piercing trucks, cars, vans and pickups, shattering windows and flattening tires — and killing Knisley. The vehicles hit include a UPS delivery truck, a Coca-Cola truck and a horse trailer.
No one besides Knisley has been injured in the shootings.
Authorities have released few details, saying only that tests on the bullets connected two shootings and declining to speculate on the type of weapon. Police did not identify the shooting linked to Knisley's.
Authorities on Friday asked whoever is responsible to call the sheriff's office.
Chief Deputy Steve Martin also advised the public to watch for changes in the behavior of friends and relatives and note if someone is missing work or appointments, shows excessive interest in the shootings or changes appearance.
It's unclear whether there is one shooter or more, Martin said.
He said authorities have received more than 150 tips. Department crime analysts also are reviewing this year's vandalism reports to see if any fit the pattern, police spokesman Sgt. Brent Mull said.
The stretch of highway in question runs through a sparsely populated area that includes woods frequented by hunters and people practicing target shooting and a few residential neighborhoods.
Knisley, a homemaker who lived about 40 miles away from Columbus, didn't like to drive in the city and was being chauffeured Tuesday by her friend Mary Cox. After Knisley's checkup following minor surgery on skin cancer lesions on her nose, the two had planned to go to lunch and go Christmas shopping.
They were talking when they heard a pop.
"What was that? What was that?" Knisley, 62, said before slumping forward, according to the recording of Cox's 911 call.
Hours later, a GMC Jimmy was hit nearby, deputies said. The same day a tractor-trailer driver for Coca-Cola Co. found a hole in the rear door of the trailer after making deliveries along I-270.
Four days earlier, Edward Cable was headed home to southern Ohio when he heard a noise in his minivan. He found a bullet hole and shell fragment about 16 inches behind the driver's seat.
Trucker William Briggs was hauling two empty trailers back from Roanoke, Va., about 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 19 when his driver's side window exploded.
Briggs had just entered I-270 from U.S. 23 and was in the center of the three westbound lanes. He kept driving, assuming he had been hit by a rock, and turned on his dome light to search for the stone but couldn't find it. A few minutes later, stopped at a truck terminal, he discovered the bullet.
"It didn't miss my face but a couple of inches at most," said Briggs, a Vietnam veteran from suburban Hilliard. "It was really luck on my part and ineptness on his part."
Briggs drove past the site of his shooting the next night and says he isn't afraid to travel the outerbelt.
"They didn't get me over there, they're not going to get me here," he said, referring to Vietnam. "Being shot at once — the odds are astronomical it's going to happen twice."