Gunman Terrorized Interstate 5 Corridor Last Year

While Spokane’s sniper is sending Interstate 90 drivers onto side streets, a shooter panicked motorists for months along a West Side highway last year.

For five months, beginning last November, commuters along the Interstate 5 corridor from Bellingham to the Canadian border drove in fear.

The rash of reported freeway shootings began to point to a single sniper, said Sgt. Gary Shand with the Washington State Patrol in Bellingham.

“I can appreciate how stressful the situation in Spokane is,” Shand said. “It was stressful for us, too.”

The first bullets struck metal. But on Jan. 1, a bullet shattered the windshield of a woman’s car as she drove north. She wasn’t hurt.

There were other reported shootings, but no injuries until Feb. 13, when a bullet crashed through the passenger window of a southbound van four miles south of the Canadian border.

The bullet burrowed into Gordon Bostock’s spine, paralyzing the 44-year-old Renton man from the waist down. After the shooting, police stepped up the investigation. WSP joined with the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department and local police in the manhunt.

Investigators canvassed a mile-long stretch of woods paralleling the freeway where Bostock was shot.

A $5,000 reward was offered.

Eventually, detectives found 9mm shell casings near a freeway overpass.

“It was a case of some pretty mundane detective work,” Shand said.

The shell casings were linked to a “cheap type of gun” - a 9mm Bryco-Jennings that sells for about $125, said WSP Lt. Russell Lybecker.

Investigators contacted gun dealers and found that only three of the guns had been sold - one of them to 25-year-old Carl Rousch, a Birch Bay resident with a prior firearms conviction, Shand said.

Rousch, a warehouseman for a trucking firm, was arrested April 6 and charged with seven counts of first-degree assault and one count of malicious mischief.

According to court documents, Rousch bragged to cellmates that he always aimed for the center of mass, the “kill zone” as he called it, when shooting at people.

Rousch, who has been in jail since his arrest, goes to trial this week. He could face life imprisonment.

, DataTimes