4 killed in deadly 12-hour span in Louisville

A man, shot dead Wednesday morning as he drove along Interstate-71 at rush hour, brought to an end an exceptionally bloody 12-hour stretch in Louisville after four people were killed in less than half a day.

The brazen daylight shooting, reported to police around 9 a.m., shut down the interstate for miles and led police on an hours-long hunt for the gunman.

Christopher McCullum, 43, was driving his white van south along the busy interstate. Near the Gene Snyder Expressway at the 7 mile marker, he allegedly opened fire into the driver's window of a black Lexus SUV traveling alongside him.

The SUV careened off the highway, into the median and crashed into a guardrail. Officers found a the driver dead of a gunshot wound in the driver's seat. Bullet holes pierced the window.

The victim has not yet been identified.

Police described the incident Wednesday as a random act of road rage. There was no clear connection between the shooter and the victim.

McCullum was caught several hours after the shooting.

Officers spent the morning searching for a white van with a green ladder on top, seen at the site of the shooting. Southbound lanes of the interstate were closed for five hours, as homicide detectives collected bullet casings and other evidence. The northbound side was funneled to one lane, and traffic backed up for miles.

McCullum's van was discovered around 1 p.m. on Interstate-64, near the Blankenbaker Road exit.

McCullum was booked with murder Wednesday evening.

Police have no suspects in the three overnight killings.

Two young men were shot dead around 9:45 p.m. in a white Dodge Charger stopped at a Shawnee stop sign.

A neighbor near the intersection of 39th Street and Garfield, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said he heard the gunfire just before 10 p.m., and looked from his window. He saw the white car parked at the stop sign across from his house with smoke rising from the hood.

Police soon arrived and found the two men dead inside the car. Deputy Coroner Jack Arnold identified the passenger as Rodney Frye, 27, of Lexington. The driver, a 32-year-old man from Gary, Indiana, has yet to be named. Both Frye and the driver were pronounced dead at the scene of multiple gunshot wounds.

Frye had rented the Dodge Charger, according to Arnold.

The neighbor said his neighborhood, where he'd lived for 20 years, is generally quiet, they look out for each other.

But a woman across the street disagrees.

"It's getting worse and worse," said Tina Brown. She doesn't feel safe anymore in her West End neighborhood, she said. She tries to be home before the sun goes down.

"Right now, everybody just needs to pray," she said. "Everybody needs to come together. We need unity."

Three hours later and two miles away in the Russell neighborhood, Sheronda Mack woke up to what she thought was fireworks.

But her neighbor, Winford Smith, 61, was shot dead in his home in the 600 block of Eastlawn Avenue. Her neighbors, she said, saw the gunman run away. Smith was pronounced dead around 2 a.m. Wednesday, Arnold said. He had suffered multiple gunshot wounds to his leg and torso.

He was friendly, she said. They lived next door to each other for several years, she got used to hearing his truck pull up and when she didn't hear it Wednesday afternoon it finally sunk in that he'd been killed.

"I'm going to miss hearing that," she said.

The spate of killings brought the total number of homicides this year up to 19, an unusually high number in Louisville.

The city averages around 60 homicides a year. By this time last year, there had been just two. In the first two months of 2013, four people were killed, and five in 2012.

Reporter Claire Galofaro can be reached at (502) 582-7086. Follow her on Twitter at @clairegalofaro.