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Driver Jailed After Women Beaten in Freeway Dispute

Times Staff Writer

An Anaheim man who police say forced a young mother off the freeway, tried to throw her sister off a 40-foot bridge and then beat both of them in a traffic dispute was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

Michael Stewart Kraft, 35, was being held Friday night in the Orange County Jail in lieu of $25,000 bail, a jail spokeswoman said.

Police said Melanie Anne Thomas, 22, was driving Wednesday afternoon with her baby and her sister, Charmian W. Walker, 20, when she tried to merge from the eastbound Garden Grove Freeway to the northbound Costa Mesa Freeway.

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Kraft, in a white Toyota pickup, was tailgating and then suddenly pulled alongside Thomas and forced her off the freeway, said Sgt. Timm Browne of the Orange Police Department.

When Thomas stopped her subcompact car on a bridge over Santiago Creek, Browne said, Kraft pulled over and began to back his truck toward her.

“I yelled and yelled, ‘Don’t back up, there’s a baby in this car!’ ” Walker recalled Friday.

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She said she leaped out of the car and in desperation pounded the truck with her hand. “I wanted this man to hear me,” she said, sobbing.

Kraft got out of his truck, she said, and pushed her against the bridge guardrail and held her over the 40-foot drop. Then he gripped her hair and began slugging her face.

“He pulled my head down as if he was going to kick me in the face, and then kept punching,” she said. “I still have fingerprints on my neck.”

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When Thomas got out of the car to pull Kraft away, he knocked her to the ground, Walker said.

“He grabbed her head like he was going to smash it into the dirt,” Walker said. “I kept thinking, ‘Just don’t hurt the baby.’ All I could think of was ‘Just don’t go for the baby.’ ”

A woman then came out of Kraft’s truck and he looked up, Walker said. The next thing she knew, he and the woman were gone.

Passing motorists stopped to help, police said, when Kraft drove away.

Her sister’s 11-month-old baby, Justin, was unharmed, Walker said.

An off-duty Westminster firefighter, Craig Campbell, followed Kraft along the freeway until he exited and stopped in the parking lot of Chapman General Hospital in Orange, police said. With the help of an off-duty West Covina police officer, Dennis Edwards, he held Kraft until Orange police officers arrived.

According to Walker and police accounts, Kraft said the incident was sparked when he was cut off on the freeway.

“He came from out of nowhere,” Walker recalled. “I didn’t even see him.”

Kraft also was arrested in the incident on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, police said. He faces arraignment Feb. 13 in Orange County Municipal Court, a jail spokeswoman said.

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Walker, who lives in Orange with her parents and a younger brother, was being driven home from her sister’s house in Whittier when the ordeal began.

Two days later, she still drives in fear.

Out on shopping errands with her mother Friday, Walker said, she was terrified when a white Toyota pickup pulled alongside them.

“I’m totally paranoid. Just being on the freeway made me sick,” she said. “I keep playing it over and over in my mind. It was just a nightmare. I keep having awful dreams.”

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