The timing of 41-year-old Damian Frausto's cold-blooded murder on Mother's Day could not have been more tragic.

He was reportedly parking his car at his home around 7:25 p.m., his wife Katrina in the passenger's seat and his 5-year-old daughter in the back, when an unknown suspect walked up to his window and shot Frausto twice in the chest.

LAPD detectives think it might have been a case of extreme road rage:

The suspect had been driving the same route as Frausto. But when the father of three stopped to park, Detective Joe Rios tells CBS2 that the suspect “flipped a U-turn just half way up the street.”

The shooter exited his vehicle, and “before you know it, the victim yelled at his wife, 'Get down! Get down! Get down!',” Rios tells the station. “She looked over; all she saw was a shotgun up against the window, which was closed, and there was two shotgun blasts into the victim's upper torso.”

Detectives believe that by telling his wife and child to “get down,” the victim may have saved their lives. The three had reportedly just returned from a Mother's Day party.

The Frausto family lives on this stretch of Borland Road in El Sereno, right near the train tracks:


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“I tried to hold my husband and when I saw him vomiting blood I got my daughter to get out from the car and I started screaming for help,” Katrina Frausto says to ABC7.

Family, friends and neighbors have begun leaving candles and flowers at the spot on Borland Road where the Fraustos' father and husband was killed. We've contacted Hollenbeck homicide detectives for any updates on the investigation.

[@simone_electra / swilson@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]

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