This day in history: 2 seriously injured while shot while driving on I-90. Spokane police chased ‘fairy tale’

From 1976: An 18-year-old Sprague man was arrested for allegedly firing a shotgun into two cars on Interstate 90, seriously injuring two.

“He pulled up beside us just long enough for us to wonder what he was doing and then he fired right at my wife, who was driving,” said Ralph Heimbigner, of Odessa, who was a passenger in the car.

Janet Heimbigner was listed in serious but stable condition in an intensive care unit at Deaconess Hospital. She suffered wounds through her jaw and mouth.

In the second shooting, Leland Fehrs, 20, an airman stationed in Grand Forks, North Dakota, was in critical condition at Sacred Heart Medical Center with extensive head injuries.

The two shootings occurred within 10 minutes of each other, around 3 a.m.

From 1926: Someone called Spokane police headquarters with a terrifying story: A little girl had been bound, gagged and tied to a tree at 10th Avenue and Arthur Street.

Police rushed to the scene and found no girl – at least, not one that was tied to a tree. They found Berneil Pitcher, 10, who said that a man with “white hair and whiskers” took her to a tree in a sack and tied her to the tree.

His “parting words were he would leave her there until 7 o’clock the next morning, when he would take her to New York.”

The officers, “scenting something wrong with the tale,” questioned her more closely, but she stuck to the story. Only later, after talking to other neighborhood kids, did the officers discover that the “whole thing was a frame-up.” Berneil and another girl made up the entire story.

“It was all a fairy tale,” said a police officer. “The child has got too vivid an imagination, that’s all.”