Egg-Tosser Gets Jail for Firing Gun at Officer : 2 Sentenced in Prank That Escalated

A 49-year-old man was sentenced to a year in jail Monday in an incident that escalated after he and a friend tossed eggs at others’ cars on the Ventura Freeway.

The prank backfired when an off-duty police officer pursued the two men in a high-speed chase, police said. When the officer followed the two men off the freeway, the egg-tosser pulled out a .357 magnum revolver and fired a single shot that missed the officer, according to authorities.

Laurence Stone, who police said fired the shot, pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon three weeks ago. The driver of the car, Barry Shulman, 33, who had pleaded guilty to being an accessory to a felony, was sentenced to 500 hours of community service Monday.

Bought 4 Dozen Eggs

“I find this one of the more unusual cases I’ve ever seen,” said Superior Court Judge David A. Horowitz before sentencing the two.

The incident occurred last Sept. 8 after Stone and Shulman left a dance at Maarev Temple in Encino and went to a bar at a West Valley Hungry Tiger Restaurant, according to a probation report. The two got bored, Shulman later told a probation officer, and stopped at a 7-Eleven store to buy four dozen eggs.

Attorneys for the defendants called their clients’ behavior bizarre and immature.

Once on the Ventura Freeway, Stone started lobbing eggs randomly at cars, police said. One of the automobiles he hit belonged to John Caparelli, an off-duty Hollywood police officer, who was driving home with his wife, according to police.

Caparelli chased the two, eventually stopping them at the intersection of Valley Vista and Saugus boulevards, where he announced that he was a policeman and drew his gun, officers said.

Stone then fired one shot at Caparelli from a registered revolver belonging to Shulman, which struck the officer’s car. The officer returned the gunfire with a volley of rounds, according to police.

Stone, at the time an unemployed Panorama City car salesman who has since moved to New Jersey, and Shulman, a North Hollywood resident, left the scene uninjured and drove directly to the Van Nuys police station, where they reported that they were victims of a shooting, police said.

Police in the meantime had received a report from Caparelli about the shooting. And Stone, under questioning, admitted firing the pistol, police said. Both he and Shulman were arrested on charges of assault with a deadly weapon. The charge against Shulman was later reduced to being an accessory to a felony.

In court Monday, attorneys for the defendants, who had no criminal records, called their clients’ behavior “bizarre and immature.”

In pleading for leniency, Shulman’s attorney, Irving Feffer, pleaded that, because his client plans to apply to law school, his sentence not include jail time. “A felony conviction would ruin his professional plans,” he said.

In sentencing Shulman, a manufacturing materials manager at Burroughs Corp. in Commerce, to 500 hours of community service, Horowitz said that Shulman’s crime was less serious than Stone’s because Shulman did not participate in the shooting.

Prosecutor Norman Montrose called the incident “right out of a Keystone comedy,” but said “the defendants should feel lucky no one was killed.”