With memories of the deadly sniper attacks in Washington still fresh, some motorists are starting to take back-roads instead of the city’s gridlocked network of motorways.

Willie Burks, 43, said that his car came under fire while driving north on the Harbor Freeway at 60mph. His friend James Wiggins, a 47-year-old car trader, was at the wheel. “All of a sudden, pow! One shot knocked the back window out,” Mr Burks told the Los Angeles Times. “It didn’t crack, it shattered. We knew it was gunfire. That’s when we both panicked. We both ducked.”

Mr Burks screamed at his friend to pull over on to the hard shoulder. But Mr Wiggins panicked and slammed down the accelerator. “But it didn’t help,” Mr Burks said, “and that’s when the shots hit him. We hit the wall. The airbag hit me. Glass hit me.”

Mr Burks survived and came to with the body of his friend slumped over him. Mr Wiggins had been killed by a gunshot to the head.

The attack, like two others, happened in daylight on a busy stretch of freeway. Police say that the shootings appear unrelated and could simply be extreme road-rage incidents — like a similar spate of freeway shootings in 1987.

Police say that car-to-car shootings are extremely hard to investigate because motorists tend to duck or keep their attention focused on the road rather than on the suspect’s vehicle. Shooters can also drive cars with blacked-out windows.

The recent killings began when Jake Tuason, a 26-year-old engineer, was shot in the head at 1pm on March 12. The bullet came from a vehicle in the car-pool lane. After that came the killing of Michael Livingston, 20, a college student who was shot at 2pm on March 29. Mr Wiggins was murdered on April 13 on the same stretch of freeway.

In the final two attacks, Ricky Smith, 32, was killed by a shot to the head when his 4x4 vehicle was sprayed with bullets last Friday, and an unidentified man was shot in the neck on Sunday on the same part of the freeway where Mr Tuason died.

The man drove himself to hospital and is expected to live.

The California Highway Patrol stopped recording the number of shootings on the roads in 2002. Police are now under pressure to connect freeway-monitoring cameras to video recorders, despite privacy concerns. The cameras keep track of congestion.

So far detectives have no suspects in any of the shootings. Although they are not ruling out the kind of “Beltway sniper attacks” that terrorised the East Coast in 2002, they are more concerned that the shootings are simply copycat incidents.

As the freeways of Los Angeles have become more congested, detectives say that drivers are less patient and more rude. “It has grown worse over the years,” Manny Padilla, a California Highway Patrol chief, told the Los Angeles Times. “People behind the wheel seem less courteous, less patient and more willing to be aggressive,” he said.

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