An incredible tragedy occurred last Saturday afternoon in the middle of a freeway in the US state of California. There a 23-month-old toddler was the victim of a highway shoot-out – probably by chance. The police assume that the family was not deliberately attacked and that the little boy (2), who was sitting in the car with his siblings and parents, was hit by a stray projectile purely by accident. An investigation into the incident is ongoing.
The Wu family and their three children were on their way home from San Francisco to their home in Fremont, California when the fateful shot was fired. The shooting followed another fatal incident in the city that left one dead and three injured in East Oakland on Friday night.
Such so-called highway shootings between warring gangs are incredibly difficult to solve because potential witnesses travel at high speed and thus find it difficult to provide reliable testimony, said the Oakland District Attorney.
There has been an accumulation of such incidents in the region in recent years, as a result of which surveillance cameras and license plate readers have been installed on motorways. According to the local police, this has significantly reduced armed violence on the highways in the area. Rival gangs drive specifically on highways to shoot each other because they know that the perpetrators are difficult to identify.
