Road rage was invented 30 years ago this summer in LA, when gunplay came to the freeways
Shots were fired, the media pounced, and a catchphrase was born
Rick Bynum’s three-year-old son was in the car when he was shot and killed on a Los Angeles highway. His crime? Their car was going 65 mph in the fast lane. That’s when a tailgater swerved up beside them and fired.
Bynum, 24, was the first in a series of road rage murders and injuries that terrorized Southern California during the summer of 1987. By the end of August, five people would be dead, and 11 more injured. Hundreds of instances of violence were reported statewide.
Some blamed the media for scaring the public; others cited inadequate police presence. Most agreed the world was becoming more fast-paced and stressful. On the road, apparently it was every man for himself.
“Highway hostility,” as The Los Angeles Times called it that summer, was not a new phenomenon. Heck, an early 1970s survey taken by Salt Lake City residents revealed that 12% of men and 18% of women felt at times that they “could gladly kill another driver.” But combine Los Angeles sprawl, growing congestion, more guns, and hot weather, and the fuse was lit. Road rage — as a phenomenon — was officially born.
After Bynum was shot, his 18-year-old girlfriend and the driver of the vehicle pulled onto a median and gestured for help. No one stopped. So she sped to the next exit and spotted a Denny’s. She pulled Bynum’s son from the car and “hollered like an idiot.” The pair waited inside while a few people checked the car for signs of life. There were none. Bynum was pronounced dead on the scene.
One month later, no arrest had been made.
By July 29, four more motorists were dead from road rage incidents; several more had literally dodged bullets by a matter of inches. In one, a man fired at a motorcyclist for writing down his license plate number after an illegal U-turn; the latter survived. Later, a stuntman on The Dukes of Hazzard was shot in the arm while arguing at a traffic light “with seven youths in a Jeep.” His four-year-old son was also with him.
Numerous headlines and reports culled from The Los Angeles Times cited “hysteria,” “terror,” “paranoia,” and called the rash of violence an “epidemic.” Newscasters at local station KTLA reportedly coined the term “road rage” during this period.
As the summer became more violent, motorists merged onto Los Angeles highways in genuine fear. Taxi drivers asked passengers for permission to take surface streets instead of congested freeways. “They didn’t mind paying the higher fare. They tell me they would rather shell out a couple of extra dollars but not be shot at,” said one. Others began driving more cautiously in general. They stopped looking into other cars or honking all together. They gave other drivers the right-of-way. They smiled frequently, more out of submissiveness than politeness. Wrote the Times, “On more than a few thoroughfares, ‘Outta my way, you jerk!’ is yielding to ‘Have a nice day.’” Even driving schools saw an uptick in enrollment. “Their heads perk up when we start talking about entering freeways, passing on freeways and how to avoid confrontations,” said Carl Beatty, the school’s training director.
“I get goose bumps now every time someone tailgates me,” said Richard Balain, a 19-year-old pizza deliverer.
More people packed their own weapons as a means of defense. “It’s a drastic change from fists to guns,” said CHP Officer Howard Powell in a July 31 report. “More and more people are arming themselves these days. In our society, people think they are getting the short end of the stick. They feel like the criminals are getting off easy, so they’re taking justice into their own hands whenever they can.”
He added, helpfully, “We ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Road rage reports continued to reverberate through the hot L.A. summer.
“You know something is terribly wrong if people are calling up from other states wondering if it’s safe to travel to Disneyland,” said CHP Chief Edward Gomez. “People are simply freaking out. Every time a pebble flies up off the pavement and hits a windshield, someone calls up and reports another freeway shooting. It’s getting ridiculous.”
On July 29, five CHP units closed the Santa Monica eastbound freeway and responded to a call of road violence. They approached with their guns drawn. A passenger had pointed a gun at another driver. Turns out, it was an 8-year-old boy with a squirt gun that looked like an uzi. When the other driver saw it, he instinctively reached for his own piece. “[The man] said if he hadn’t noticed the gun wasn’t real, he would have shot the kid,” said an officer. “He didn’t even realize it was a kid at first.”
Still, the LAPD put more officers on the highways, normally the domain of the highway patrol. The department encouraged its 317 motorcycle cops to take the freeway on their commutes home.
Old-timers were quick to point out how nice Los Angeles used to be. Now they blamed “the melting pot.” Said David Grayson of the Automobile Club of Southern California, “We clearly have an influx of people who didn’t grow up here…but whether from Italy or France or Korea…they have one thing in common: They don’t have the depth of experience of growing up with the freeways.” He added that with language barriers, “it’s difficult to communicate civility.”
Xenophobia aside, there were simply more people and not enough (or the right kind) of infrastructure. In 1987, California had registered 23 million cars, double the number from 20 years earlier. In Los Angeles County alone, there were 6 million automobiles, the equivalent of 10,000 cars per mile of freeway.
In August, the Assembly of Public Safety Committee passed a series of bills that added 150 more CHP and set aside $950,000 in funding to catch shooters. They made it a felony punishable by up to three years in prison for carrying a firearm in the glove compartment. (The NRA objected.)
The rash of highway violence in Los Angeles eventually faded, and the term “road rage” actually didn’t catch on at the time. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the media picked up on a new road rage “epidemic,” and this time it was international. After Princess Diana’s death, The New York Times wrote a headline: “Road Rage in Paris.”
Now people blamed SUVs, political correctness, and 1980s movies like Mad Max: The Road Warrior. But maybe road rage always boiled down to the wise words of CHP veteran Ken Daily, who in 1987, said, “It’s nothing new, just now they have weapons.”
