Girl Shot in Foot After Shouting at Car Driver

A 16-year-old girl was shot in the foot early Monday morning after she and her cousin argued with a slow driver on Skyline Drive in East San Diego.

Kimberly Hopkins, a passenger in a car driven by her cousin, was treated at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in San Diego after the 12:18 a.m. incident, according to San Diego Police Department spokesman Bill Robinson.

Hopkins and her unidentified cousin were driving down Skyline Drive near Tinkerbell Park when they passed a slow driver and shouted at him. The driver, described by the teen-agers as a Latino man, shouted back.

When Hopkins and her cousin pulled into a driveway in the 7100 block of Skyline Drive and got out of their car, the angry driver passed by and shouted at them again. Hopkins and her cousin shouted back and ran after the man when he pulled out a small-caliber gun and fired two shots, one of which hit Hopkins in the foot. The man fled the scene.

The traffic violence was one of the first such incidents reported in San Diego County since a spate of random shootings began on Los Angeles freeways almost two months ago.

In La Mesa, police said two teen-agers driving east on Interstate 8 near Fletcher Parkway reported that a car following them flashed its hazard lights and that passengers in the car shouted, threw rocks and fired a gun at them.

“This incident was right after the articles came out about the L.A. shootings,” said Lt. Allan Joslyn of the La Mesa police. “We haven’t had any incidents like this, nothing we can tie in to the freeway-type mania in L.A., until now.”

Joslyn said it is more important to stress courtesy among motorists than to chastise those who become involved in arguments on the road.

“The most important thing for motorists to remember is to be courteous, almost to a fault,” he said.