Drivers Rammed by Truck Recall Terror on Freeway

By STEPHANIE SIMON

Sept. 30, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

They heard nothing.

No screeching brakes. No blaring horn. Nothing.

They saw nothing, either.

But they certainly felt something. From the silence and the dark it came: a terrifying jolt. The jolt of a big rig loaded with cars racing down the San Bernardino Freeway without headlights--and steering smack into them.

“Unless he was drunk and just blacked out, he hit me on purpose,” said Brian Swanson, who was driving home to West Covina when the big rig hit his Toyota pickup, smashing it so hard the sunroof popped out. “He hit me dead on in the middle of my truck.”

CHP investigators agree with Swanson’s outraged assessment.

Truck driver John Alan Oden, they say, steered his big rig into at least four vehicles on the westbound freeway about 3 a.m. Sunday, sucking one frightened driver after another into a dangerous--and altogether one-sided--game of bumper cars. No one was seriously hurt, though several victims complained of neck and back pain.

Even for Southern California’s drama-prone freeways, it was a freaky and terrifying episode.

“It was all deliberate,” CHP Officer Cynthia Koolis said. “We’re not taking this as an accident. He was deliberately turning into all those vehicles.”

Oden, 23, an Alabama resident, was under arrest Monday on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. The officers who arrested him after a wild 11-mile chase through San Bernardino County saw no indication that he was drunk or under the influence of drugs, though they hope that a urinalysis will yield definitive results later this week, Koolis said.

For now, the CHP has no indication of any possible motive.

“Who knows?” Koolis summed up with a sigh. “Crazy?”

The other motorists surely think so.

The freeway was nearly deserted at 3 a.m. Sunday, and they were cruising home at 65 to 70 mph through San Bernardino County near Ontario. There was plenty of space to pass them. There were several vacant lanes. And yet, without warning, the big rig stacked with six cars rode their bumpers and then bashed them. Two witnesses said they had no doubt that the driver was aiming at other cars, not swerving inadvertently into them.

“I watched him go for the truck in front of me,” said Jacob Trinkaus, 19, who was returning home to Covina from a friend’s house. “He had the whole freeway open, and he chose to go over to the lane where the white truck was driving. It looked like he wanted that truck bad.”

He also apparently wanted Trinkaus’ Honda Accord.

With headlights dimmed--or damaged from previous crashes--the big-rig driver was able to sneak up on Trinkaus as he sped west on the freeway just a mile or so past the junction with Interstate 15, cruise control set at 70 mph, Trinkaus said. Though several CHP units were chasing the rig at that point, the officers were too far back for Trinkaus to see their red lights or hear their sirens.

He said he noticed nothing, in fact, until about three seconds before the impact. Then, glancing in his rearview mirror, he spotted the yellow lights along the top of the rig.

He had only enough time to realize that his pursuer “was going way too fast.”

Seconds later: Thunk.

His bumper cracked in half. His trunk crumpled. The side panels of his Accord caved in. The big rig pushed him over a full lane before he could regain control. “It was like something you see on the news,” he said. “Not something that you think could ever happen to you.”

Even after the big rig had sped away, allegedly aiming for Swanson’s pickup, Trinkaus was not sure exactly what had happened to him. “It wasn’t like I heard a crash sound,” Trinkaus said. “I just felt pain.”

Trinkaus’ younger brother, Brian, watched the entire incident from his car a few dozen yards back.

“I saw this diesel fly past me at 80 to 85 mph,” Brian Trinkaus said. “I saw him move right up behind my brother, and I thought, ‘Hey, he ain’t stopping.’ He piled right into my brother, smashed him out of the way, then went for the pickup truck. . . . He didn’t hit his brakes. He didn’t slow down. I was petrified.”

Swanson and Trinkaus both complained of back and neck pain after the incident, but said they felt lucky to have escaped more serious injury.

Their cars did not fare as well. Trinkaus’ Accord had several thousand dollars worth of damage. And Swanson’s Toyota pickup was “pretty screwed up,” he said--the bed crumpled, the rear window shattered and the sunroof in shards.

“He hit me pretty good,” Swanson, 24, said. “That’s a pretty big thing to get hit with.”

CHP investigators had not determined Monday where Oden was transporting the six automobiles stacked on his big rig. They did not know whether the cars were new or used.

The officers began chasing Oden at 3:09 a.m. after one victim, the 29-year-old driver of a Toyota Tercel, called police on her cellular phone to report that a big rig had veered into her on the San Bernardino Freeway westbound near the Cherry Avenue exit near Fontana. The other crashes occurred not long after.

The CHP then pursued Oden for about 11 miles through Fontana, Ontario, Upland and Montclair, at speeds that topped 95 mph, Koolis said.

The chase ended only when Oden steered into a guardrail near Monte Vista Avenue--a collision that left his rig perched precariously on top of the concrete barrier. Even then, Oden refused to leave his cab and officers had to pull him out to arrest him, Koolis said. Investigators said the driver didn’t offer any explanation.

“I have no idea what was going through that guy’s head,” Brian Trinkaus said. “Something wrong.”