Auto Violence

Hostility on the highway

Mark Furman, 28, and his wife Claudia, 24, were driving from Milwaukee to Chicago when their car was bumped from behind by a Cadillac carrying four passengers. Two of them jumped from the Caddie, shot and killed Mark, then pistol-whipped Claudia and shot her in the right arm. More and more, say authorities, motorists are attacking one another with fists, knives, guns--or with the car itself--after minor accidents or quarrels over right-of-way.

On Long Island, an enraged driver who thought he had been cut off smashed the offending vehicle with an ax. In a lane-changing argument . in Sacramento, a passenger in a pickup truck shot and killed the driver of the other car. After a near collision in Virginia, two drivers tried to settle matters by staging a shootout. "This is getting more common," says a Chicago Police Lieutenant. "Everybody seems to be uptight." Even some men on his own force. In the Windy City last year, two off-duty officers were fired and one was placed on probation for attacking other motorists after auto collisions.

More often, police are victims of the rising freeway fury. Last year 413 California highway patrolmen were attacked and injured by people they had pulled over to the side of the road, up from 244 in 1973. The Los Angeles police report 364 incidents last year in which vehicles were used for assault.

Some psychologists argue that popular self-awareness and self-assertion literature has helped push motorists to violence. But University of Chicago Psychiatrist Lawrence Z. Freedman, who served as an Adviser to the Presidential Commission on Violence, may be closer to the mark. Heterogeneous groups tend to produce more violence than homogeneous ones, he says, and the highway population is predictably heterogeneous, filled with drivers of different ethnic backgrounds and classes. In other words, many naturally aggressive people tamp down their hostility on their home turf, but unleash it on "aliens" after minor collisions.

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