Michigan driver clinging to life after highway murder attempt

By Eric M. Johnson

(Reuters) – A motorist was shot multiple times and critically wounded on Friday by someone in another vehicle as they drove along Interstate 94 in Detroit and Michigan police were working to identify a suspect who drove away.

State police said a 28-year-old man from Detroit was deliberately targeted by at least one shooter from an encroaching vehicle during a dispute that ended on the highway, though the motivation behind the shooting was not fully clear.

A 25-year-old woman passenger was injured by broken glass and pieces of metal as several bullets were fired into their car, said Calvin Hart, a Michigan State Police spokesman.

The victim was being treated at an area hospital, Hart said. The woman was expected to live.

The gunfire came as the cars were traveling side by side for more than a hundred feet along Interstate 94 near the Lodge Freeway in Detroit on Friday afternoon, Hart said.

“He was actually being targeted, and it led to the shooting,” Hart said. “He was obviously trying to harm or kill, based on the number of gun shots.”

Photographs from the scene show a gray car, its windshield cracked, idled on the inside lane with its doors ajar.

State police reopened the highway about four hours after news of the shooting, and had warned drivers to avoid the area until after the rush hour.

Two weeks ago a Michigan judge ruled that an Uber [UBER.UL] driver charged with murdering six people over a five-hour spree in between driving customers in Kalamazoo, about 150 miles west of Detroit, was competent to stand trial.

It also comes more than two years after a Michigan man was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a three-day shooting spree in October 2012 on a busy interstate highway that earned him the nickname “I-96 shooter.”

In Arizona last week, a judge dismissed charges against a man accused in a series of freeway shootings that terrorized Phoenix-area drivers last year, after ballistics evidence against him was challenged by defense lawyers.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by G Crosse and James Dalgleish)