A road-rage freeway shooting appears to have occurred Monday afternoon in San Francisco, though no one was injured, and the CHP is still investigating.
The incident happened around 1:50 p.m. Monday on Interstate 280. As KTVU reports, CHP responded to the area of the shooting immediately after receiving the call, and "confirmed that at least one shot had been fired on the highway."
The victim in this case reportedly exited the freeway after the shot was fired and pulled up in front of the Hall of Justice in SoMa. The victim was not injured, and there was no one else in their vehicle.
The CHP has not shared any further information, like the make or model of the suspect vehicle.
This is the second freeway shooting in San Francisco in a week. Last Monday, June 19, CHP-San Francisco officers responded to Highway 101 just south of the 280 interchange, to a call about a single-car crash.
As the agency explained in a release, officers determined that a freeway shooting had led to that crash. The victim had not sustained any injuries in the shooting, but sustained minor injuries as a result of the crash.
Freeway shootings have been particularly prevalent around the Bay Area in the last several years, with the pandemic seeming to have played some role in the increase in road rage incidents. As NBC Bay Area reported this spring, the number of annual reported freeway shootings more than doubled between 2019 and 2021, from 82 to 178, with 15 resulting in fatalities during that three-year span. In Contra Costa County alone, there were only four reported freeway shootings in 2019, and that rose to 49 in 2021, in the most dramatic increase.
154 freeway shooting incidents were reported in 2022 across our region, which was double the number that occurred in Los Angeles during that same year.
CHP attributes the rise in freeway incidents both to gang activity and road rage.
In one tragic April incident, a five-year-old girl was killed in Hayward when a bullet pierced the car she was in with her family on I-880. No one else in the car was injured. And two suspects are now standing trial for the November 2021 freeway shooting in Oakland that took the life of two-year-old Jasper Wu.
Photo: Tony Webster
