Interstate shootings, history repeating itself

Louisiana’s interstate highway gun activity is expanding.

Tuesday, February 21, a driver passing the Oneal Lane exit in Baton Rouge heard a loud pop. Arriving at her office in Denham Springs, she dug a .45 caliber slug from her driver’s side door, just below the glass. One inch higher, the bullet would have struck the driver’s torso instead of her car door.

Wednesday afternoon, February 22, according to police, an unknown assailant shot a 25-year-old male multiple times on Interstate 10 near the Louisa Street exit. The wounded man drove himself to a nearby business and called 9-1-1.

According to the New Orleans Police Department, Sunday night, just after ten on Interstate 10, also near the Louisa Street exit, someone pulled alongside a car, fired several gunshots, and wounded a male passenger.

Between June 2020 and October 2022, interstate highways inside New Orleans hosted an average of two random shootings per month. However, the 2022 total exceeded this average, reaching 30 freeway shootings last year. Two months into 2023, with nine shootings on Interstate 10, the average number of interstate shootings has more than tripled.

At 5:31 Monday afternoon, two men shot dead on an I-10 service road crashed their black Dodge through a fence. Police say they hit a white Nissan traveling westbound on I-10 between the Read and Crowder Boulevard exits.

A couple inside the Nissan sustained injuries from the crash, and a woman riding with them suffered a gunshot to the head.

One week ago, a shooter killed a woman on Interstate 10 near Almonaster Avenue in an eastbound lane near the high-rise bridge. Before she died, the woman told police a red four-door vehicle pulled up next to her car, and someone inside opened fire.

Two weeks ago, a 21-year-old man told police he was driving an eastbound lane of I-10 when someone shot through his car door, embedding a bullet in his knee.

Friday, January 27, another 21-year-old survived a similar assault on I-10 East near Dwyer Road. A car he did not recognize pulled beside him, and a passenger fired a bullet through his door and into his wrist.

Sunday, January 29, on I-10 East near Read Boulevard, a black sedan left a 23-year-old with a shot to the neck.

Monday, January 30, a news release from the New Orleans Police Department said these interstate shootings fell into three categories: (1) interactions between motorists that escalated into road rage, (2) pre-existing feuds where shooters are targeting someone they know, and (3) someone caught in the crossfire. However, the three victims in January claimed to have been shot by someone who pulled alongside them and fired—someone they did not know.

NOPD has shared sparse details about these shootings, including descriptions of assailants, their vehicles, and the caliber of their ammunition. Surveillance images, if they exist, are rarely released. However, NOPD retained two women in October after a video of them went viral on social media. The clip showed 21-year-old India Fazande and 20-year-old Erica Nettles inside a vehicle as someone fired shots at cars passing on the interstate.

Luckily for these two, no one reported being wounded that night.

Police insist freeway shootings do not result from coordinated attacks by serial shooters. Before his recent surprise retirement, NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson told reporters, “We have no evidence any of these shots came from a single source,” suggesting interstate shooters cannot work in pairs or groups.

However, history suggests otherwise. A Virginia court executed Louisiana’s most infamous interstate sniper less than 20 years ago, and he did not work alone.

Shortly after John Williams’ birth in Baton Rouge, our Lady of the Lake doctors diagnosed his mother, Eva, with breast cancer. When Eva died, John’s father, Ernest, dropped him at his grandparents in New Orleans and left the state.

John was three years old.

In August 1978, John enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard.

After transferring to the Regular Army in 1985, he qualified with the M16, earning an Expert Rifleman’s Badge, the Army’s highest of three marksmanship levels a soldier can receive for basic rifle training.

John fought in Iraq’s Gulf War and received an honorable discharge after serving his country for sixteen years.

At his trial in 2003, the prosecution demonstrated how John modified his car and built a sniper’s nest inside the trunk.

In 2014, Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s deputies confiscated a similar vehicle in New Orleans. Deputies pulled over what the FBI labeled a sniper van, complete with a loaded rifle, scope, and silencer.

At his trial, John William’s prosecutors introduced 400 pieces of evidence. They questioned 130 witnesses, and ballistics experts linked a Bushmaster rifle found in John’s car to eight killings in Louisiana, Alabama, and Washington, DC.

John’s accomplice, a minor, explained how John trained him to be a freeway sniper. He told the court the pair selected interstate highways to leave crime scenes quickly by hiding among the other vehicles.

The accomplice said John wanted to kill six people daily but changed plans due to heavy traffic and the lack of a clear shot between cars.

One year before these shootings began, authorities claim, John Allen Williams converted to Islam and changed his name to John Allen Muhammad. However, John’s accomplice said John did not share this information with him. Although some news reports called him “The DC Sniper,” Lee Boyd Malvo testified to knowing his mentor only as John Williams.

Lee Malvo, now serving life, believed his partner planned a Canadian retirement after extorting money from the United States government to stop the duo’s shooting rampage.

Without the fear of terrorism caused by the September 11 horror, history’s infamous “Beltway Snipers” may have gone ignored, written off as gang violence or random road rage, much like our “Interstate 10 Snipers” today.