On Sunday mornings you can always find Trinity and I on the freeway, en route to church. This Sunday morning, it so happened that we ended up on the freeway for two hours, only to traverse the distance between the 405 and the Van Nuys exit off the 101.

Yes. We got caught in the backup of the Sherman Oaks freeway shooting.

I’m actually quite lucky when it comes to traffic. Working the night shift, I usually have no traffic going home and very little traffic (by LA standards) on the way to work. I guess it all balances out by my getting caught up in super snarls like the downtown protest a few years ago. I also remember, when I was my mom’s teen copilot, getting stuck on the 60 freeway while a helicopter landed for some reason. Yeah, two miles, two hours.

More about the shooting, via Yahoo:

Investigators did not know what led to the fatal shooting on the 101 Freeway in the San Fernando Valley on Sunday. The wreck snarled traffic for several hours near Van Nuys.

“There’s absolutely no witnesses at this time, no information,” Los Angeles police Officer Norma Eisenman said.

The car crashed near a freeway onramp, so it was possible the victim was shot before entering the highway, Eisenman said.

The second shooting was in Long Beach, where the victim was able to drive himself off the freeway and phone for help on Saturday night, Officer Jackie Bezart said.

The man told officers another motorist shot at him as the result of road rage along the 710 Freeway, Bezart said. The man was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

Investigators do not think the cases were related to three other shootings, two that were fatal, in the past several weeks on Southern California freeways.

I shudder to think that freeway shootings really are making a comeback, since summer is approaching, and freeway shooting always seem to peak in high temperatures.

By the way, does it piss off anyone else that cars trying to get to the right lanes at a freeway closure get the short end of the stick, in terms of getting to the exit? Trin and I immediately turned to AM news radio when we hit the snarl, and I told him to get to the right as soon as possible. It irritates me that everyone else going toward the left of us was getting off before we did. That makes no sense.

Oh, and I would have taken pictures, but my camera was in the trunk. Oh well.

AP Photo lifted from Yahoo

And some video: