Latest incident not 1st of its kind in Central Va.

Thursday’s roadside shootings along Interstate 64 are not the first of their ilk in Central Virginia: For 10 days in 1991, an armed assailant kept motorists watching and worried as 17 drivers were fired upon with no apparent rhyme or reason in a series of drive-by shootings.
At least 12 of the inci-dents were confirmed to be from the same shooter, who fired at other motorists from a moving car. Most of the shootings happened on U.S. 250 and U.S. 29, but four occurred on Route 340 in Augusta County as well.
“I worked [as a state trooper] for 23 years. I was never shot at,” Bill Almond told The Daily Progress shortly after a shooter blasted out a window in his 1990 Ford Tempo. “All at once the glass explodes behind my head.”
“You guys got a nut loose down there,” said Frederick Hinderschied from his motorcycle shop in Muskegon, Mich., after the tractor-trailer he was co-piloting through town was shot. Hinderschied told The Daily Progress that he was concentrating on road signs and traffic, trying to get to the interstate, when it happened.
“All of a sudden, kaboom! The bullet came in 4 inches above my head,” Hinderschied said.
The gunman struck nine times between Aug. 10 and 11, firing rounds from either a .38-caliber or .357 Magnum handgun. The shootings subsided for about seven months and happened again in October 1991 on U.S. 250 near the Nelson County and Albe-marle County border.
That shooting led to the arrest of James Lee Hartman, a Maryland man, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to Central State Hospital. He said he was shooting at drug traffickers in airplanes who were trying to kill him. He said he was working in his capacity as an FBI recruit and that agents had implanted microphones in his brain.
He was a suspect in the other drive-by shootings, but investigators deter-mined there was insuffi-cient evidence to charge him.
The shootings left police frustrated because the incidents were random and without apparent motive, making them difficult to solve.
“There’s a lot of places that shootings like these can happen and no guaran-tee we’re going to be in the right place,” Albemarle County Police Chief John Miller said in 1991.
While uncommon, ran-dom highway and roadway shootings are not rare. Roadside shooters terror-ized freeway drivers in Los Angeles in 1987, and inci-dents similar to those in Central Virginia also were reported in 1991, including shootings in Greensboro, N.C., and throughout Ohio.
According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, in August 1999, 18-year-old Sara Anne Bruehl was killed after a man opened fire on her vehicle on Inter-state 64 in New Kent County.
More recently, in April 2007, someone fired multi-ple rounds into a car with two occupants traveling north between Maury and Broad streets in Richmond. A woman was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
In December 2003, two state troopers were fired upon while standing near a disabled tractor-trailer on Interstate 95 near the Boulevard exit in Rich-mond. No one was injured, though about 10 shots were fired.
In May 2000, a Stafford County woman driving on Interstate 95 was shot at.
In late June 1996, the rear driver’s-side window of a van traveling north on Interstate 295 in Hanover County was shattered by gunfire. No one was in-jured, but that same week saw another 11 vehicles hit with gunfire on the inter-states. State police said they believed a pellet gun firing a hollow BB was being used by someone riding on the highways.