Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : AT THE SCENE : Suspect Arrested in Freeway Death of Corona Officer

Corona police, looking for the man who had fired a shotgun at a van on the Riverside Freeway and killed the Police Department’s first woman officer, received a tip by telephone and, four days after the shooting, arrested Harold Harvey Hawks, a sheet metal worker from Pomona.

Police said Hawks, 26, admitted firing at the van but seemed surprised to learn that someone had been hit.

“He was upset over it,” said one investigator. Hawks told authorities that the van was being driven erratically, “so he figured he’d put a slug in the side of the van and teach them a lesson,” the investigator said.

The van, being driven by Mike Dwyer, a Riverside Fire Department captain, was headed toward a Riverside hospital with Dwyer’s injured son aboard. Mark Dwyer, 24, had been hurt during a motorcycle race at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa.

Mike Dwyer told police that he came up behind a car in the freeway’s fast lane, flashed his headlights, then went around the car when it wouldn’t move over.

Police said the car pulled alongside the van, motioned Dwyer to pull off the freeway, then fired a slug from a 12-gauge shotgun into the side of the van.

The bullet struck Dwyer’s wife, Patricia, 45, an off-duty Corona police officer. The same bullet also severely wounded another woman in the vehicle.

Investigators said that Hawks and his wife are in the process of getting a divorce. On the day of the shooting, Hawks was angered over having to wait four hours to pick up his 2-year-old son for a trip to the mountains. Police said the boy was in the car, probably asleep, when the shot was fired.

Hawks said that he had one beer before the shooting but was not drunk, an investigator said.

About 1,000 friends and fellow law enforcement officers paid tribute to Mrs. Dwyer in services at Crossroads Christian Church in Corona. She was buried at Crestlawn Memorial Park in Riverside.