Reporter’s Notebook -- Deepa Bharath

It was a loud bang followed by the sound of crumbling glass.

And then it happened.

Gusts of wind bellowed into my car and little pieces of glass flew in

the air drifting dangerously in my direction.

Driving to work on the Costa Mesa Freeway, I tried to slow down and

figure out what had just happened. I saw the right side rear window of my

Honda Civic quickly disintegrating -- like somebody had hit it with a

sledgehammer.

My husband had lovingly polished that glass with Windex over the

weekend. Now there was a hole the size of a football there.

Three years ago, when I first came to Southern California, I was

mortified even when I caught a glimpse of busy freeways from the airplane

preparing to land at Los Angeles International Airport.

Surely, I was not expected to drive at 65 mph with these big rigs

whizzing past me, was I? I couldn’t spend hours dodging careless

commuters who drive with a cell phone in one hand and a breakfast burrito

in the other, could I?

As it happened, I was expected to drive on the freeways and, as it

turned out, I wasn’t too bad at anticipating mistakes other drivers might

make.

My job almost made it mandatory to spend close to three hours on the

freeway every day. And I got used to it.

But it got scarier over the days and months as I became aware of the

perils that await unsuspecting drivers.

“This crazy guy on the freeway shot at me when I was going to a school

board meeting,” I heard a frazzled colleague telling others in the

newsroom about six months ago.

You hear about these mean people all the time. Kids throwing rocks at

passing vehicles from bridges. Vandals and miscreants shooting BB guns

randomly.

Well, even if you don’t do what I do for a living, I bet your

imagination would run amok if your car window transformed into powdered

glass before your very eyes.

So, I pulled over and checked it out. I was calmer than I would have

expected to be. I guess I owe my composure to hearing, researching and

writing about accidents and crimes every day.

Puzzled and, to a certain extent, desensitized, I knocked off the rest

of the glass and looked inside the car in the middle of the broken glass.

I realized I was looking for a bullet or a pellet.

I couldn’t see a rock. But, surely, something hit the glass. I did

hear a bang. So I drove to work and called one of my sources, a police

officer who has probably seen hundreds of cars shot and several glasses

shatter.

“Hmm, that’s strange,” he said. “If it were a rock or a BB gun, the

glass could’ve cracked. But for it to totally shatter like that, it

probably had to have been something bigger.”

Something bigger. A handgun? A rifle? A stun gun? An AK-47 perhaps?

There was only one thing left to do. I called the California Highway

Patrol.

The watch commander quietly listened for a minute as I told him my

story.

“Yeah, that’s the way it’s supposed to break,” he said as a matter of

fact.

Excuse me?

“It’s designed to break that way so the shards don’t come out and hurt

you,” he explained patiently. “We get a lot of these calls, you know,

people thinking they’ve been shot on the freeway.”

“So, I don’t have to file a complaint?” I asked him.

“Against who? The rock that hit your car?” the officer said with a

laugh. “Sure, ma’am. If we find that rock, we’ll let you know.”

-- Deepa Bharath covers cops and courts. She may be reached at (949)

574-4226 or by e-mail at o7 deepa.bharath@latimes.comf7 .