Driving in the Line of Fire

摘要

First came the boom. Ed cable heard it driving home Nov. 21 on a lonely stretch of highway about eight miles south of downtown Columbus, Ohio. It was loud enough to make him hit the brakes. Then came the explosion-"right beside me," Cable says. "I immediately got off the highway and got out of the car." Shaken, the retired corrections officer saw the driver's-side window of his minivan was splintered and the roof had a hole "the size of a 50￠ piece." A policeman stopped to help, but Cable, 53, says he could not convince him that the shard on the floorboard had come from a bullet, and the officer went on his way. Four days later, after Gail Kinsley, 62, was killed by a gun shot while riding in a car near that same strip of highway, Cable called the police. They matched the fragment in his van to the bullet that killed her. Authorities in Ohio last week said 14 recent shootings in the area were linked, five of them through ballistic evidence. All were clustered in a seven-mile patch of Interstate 270, a semirural community of cornfields and strip malls. The first, in May, hit a car that had been left without gas on the shoulder. The next, in August, hit a trailer towing a horse. In October and November, the frequency accelerated. Since Oct. 10, three tractor-trailers, seven cars and a nearby school have been struck. Last Monday a woman who lives 150 yds. north of 270 came home to find a bullet in her living room. Police refuse to use the word sniper, but Franklin County feels that menace just the same.