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| Saturday, July 29, 2006 | (No comments posted.)
Times Staff Report
HAMMOND | Lake County and Hammond police are looking for someone who may have lain and waited on Michigan Street to shoot at a motorist Friday afternoon.
Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said every available officer is looking for the man who shot out the window of a GMC pickup truck driven by a Gary resident.
Tom Fults told police he was driving east on Michigan Avenue at 2:15 p.m. and as he came around a curve near Cline Avenue, he heard a loud boom and his window shattered, sheriff's spokesman Mike Higgins said in a news release.
This is the fourth such incident in four days in the Cline Avenue area.
Even though no ballistics evidence has been recovered, investigators are treating the incidents as shootings, Higgins said. Hammond police searched the area with metal detectors into the afternoon.
The weapon likely is a small-caliber gun or a BB or pellet gun, McDermott said.
Lake County Sheriff Rogelio "Roy" Dominguez reassigned a dozen officers from the Drug Impact Unit and the Power Shift to patrol Cline Avenue through the weekend. He also ordered the aviation unit to conduct aerial surveillance of Cline Avenue and the Whiting Pierogi Festival.
"We would rather err on the side of caution than sit back and see someone injured," Dominguez said in a news release.
Police found a matted patch of grass along Michigan Avenue where the suspect may have been lying. In the latest shooting, officers searched for what they described as a Hispanic male, 20 to 30 years old, with a long ponytail, wearing a white tank top and blue jeans.
On Thursday, a Dyer woman driving on Interstate 80/94 near Cline Avenue at 9 a.m. had something hit her windshield on the driver's side. Later Thursday, just before 3 p.m., a utility truck driver's passenger-side window was hit by a projectile near Calumet and Cline avenues. No one was seen near the areas in those cases.
On Tuesday, a Hammond man driving to his job in Gary just before 7 a.m. said he saw a man in a trench coat pull out a long gun. The driver's windshield was struck at the intersection of Cline Avenue and 169th Street.
So far, no one has been hurt in any of the incidents.
McDermott said because the Pierogi Festival began Thursday, he expects the area to be filled with festivalgoers. Crowd safety is their top priority, he said.
"We're going to find him eventually," McDermott said.
Staff Writers Ruthann Robinson and Bill Dolan and Correspondent Royal M. Hopper III contributed to this report.
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