An assault rifle pointed from a minivan on Highway 60 in Walnut Friday afternoon prompted another driver to follow the vehicle onto Highway 71, into Chino Hills north of Orange County and finally a parking lot where seven summoned police and sheriff's units soon arrived as well.
Shortly thereafter, it was discovered the weapon was only a toy.
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A Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department statement issued Sunday says
that before it was learned the gun was a replica, deputies had asked two
parents standing outside the minivan to come to them. The children were
then ordered out of the minivan, but they did not comply, according to
the release.
Approaching deputies then figured out a toy sparked the scare. No one
was cited or arrested, but officers did lecture the parents
about the horrors that could come to someone pointing even a toy gun along the dusty trails of today's wild, wild west.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.