Maple Heights police look for suspect after deadly road rage shooting, crash
MAPLE HEIGHTS, Ohio (WJW) – Police in Maple Heights are searching for the driver who shot and killed another driver during an apparent road rage incident.
A neighbor’s surveillance camera picked up the sound of six gunshots near Cato Street and North Boulevard in Maple Heights just before 7 p.m. Wednesday.
Moments after, it sounded like two more shots were fired, one car slammed into Alfreidia Forkland’s home on the corner and the other vehicle kept going.
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“I heard some noise and I was scared to go outside, so I wasn’t going outside and I heard they hit my wall over there. I went to the door and it was a guy on the outside and a guy over there by the car. Underneath the car and I called 911,” said Forkland.
Forkland’s home was not seriously damaged, but the impact knocked photos and other items off a book shelf and broke a window in her basement.
“I didn’t know what was wrong with him. I didn’t even know he was shot,” she said.
“There was a road rage incident. Started on Libby Road and ended up over in the area of Arch and North Avenue. The road rage had escalated and turned into one of the vehicle firing a gun into the other vehicle,” said Maple Heights Police Chief Todd Hansen.
After the vehicle struck the home, the driver, identified as 32-year old Christopher Jones, got out, collapsed and later died at the hospital.
Investigators say they are still trying to figure out what sparked the road rage, but witnesses tell police that Jones made a bizarre turn out of a parking lot.
“There was one witness account that we had that actually the victim had been driving erratically and may have angered the other driver and that’s how this road rage starts out. These things start and they went back and forth a little bit,” said the chief.
Chief Todd Hansen says the road rage incident lasted for about a quarter to a half mile.
“We’ve been talking to a lot of people in the area, we’ve been finding a lot of witnesses, we have gotten some footage from buildings and other things and we also have Flock cameras, license plate reader cameras,” said Hansen.
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The chief assures residents there is no threat to their safety.
“It seems like a ‘one-off.’ These road rage incidents, a lot of times, they’re just two people getting angry at each other. It wasn’t like a target kind of thing as far as we can tell,” said Chief Hansen.
Chief Hansen says detectives are getting some good leads and hope to release photos of the suspect vehicle.
They believe it’s a dark-colored vehicle, possibly a cross-over.
The chief says if you’re ever confronted with a road rage incident, do not engage the other driver. Try to de-escalate the situation as much as possible.
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