Woman guilty in gun rage on 422

WEST CHESTER >> A Berks County woman who was accused of pointing a handgun at a couple during a road rage incident on Route 422 was found guilty by a Common Pleas Court jury on charges that could spell prison time.

The couple, who had gone to King of Prussia for a “date night” on a break from their four children, testified that the driver of another car had acted aggressively toward them while they drove in heavy traffic on the four-lane highway through northern Chester County on a Saturday night last winter.

At some point during the jockeying, the driver of the other car, later identified as Francine Bollinger, pulled alongside the couple’s car to the right in the westbound lanes of the highway. With her window rolled down, they said, the driver pointed the pistol at them for several moments before pulling away.

When Bollinger was confronted by police at her home in Douglassville, she admitted having had an altercation on the road shortly before. She also admitted having a weapon inside her car but insisted that she had simply held up her cell phone at the driver’s window, and said the couple had been responsible for the aggressive driving.

The jury rejected that version of events, however.

Bollinger, 50, was found guilty of charges including terroristic threats, simple assault by menace, and recklessly endangering another person.

The jury of seven women and five men heard the case in Judge Ann Marie Wheatcraft’s courtroom on Thursday and Friday. State sentencing guidelines call for a minimum of six months in prison on each charge, primarily because Bollinger was judged to have used a deadly weapon in the incident. In his opening remarks to the jury, Assistant District Attorney Daniel Hollander said that the rage that Bollinger exhibited on the highway added to the road confrontation an element of danger. “Rage can even be a deadly thing,” while driving on a highway with a loaded weapon. Had it gone off, even by accident, lives could have been lost, he said.

“They were scared for their lives,” Hollande said of the couple in his opening statement. “They said their lives flashed before their eyes.”

But defense attorney Alphonso Gambone of Philadelphia, representing Bollinger,

said the blame for the incident lay instead with the couple, Felix Gonzalez and Brittany Morris. They had been driving erratically and gestured at Bollinger as she was driving home. “She was trying to diffuse the situation,” he told the panel.

The incident occurred around 8 p.m. on Feb. 16 on Route 422, the highway that connects King of Prussia with the suburbs outside Reading.

According to what Gonzalez and Morris told North Coventry police Officer Andrew Zinger, they were driving home from a night out in King of Prussia. Traffic was heavy, and the car behind them seemed impatient to get around them; tailgating, driving close to their rear bumper.

They said the driver pulled into the right lane, made a pass of their car into the left lane, braked several times, and then swerved back into the right lane. The car slowed, and as the driver pulled alongside, they saw a woman pointing a black and silver pistol at them.

They were able to call police and describe what had happened, and police were able to trace the car to Bollinger’s address, arriving there before she returned home. When confronted, she denied having shown the weapon at all but acknowledged that she had a pistol in her car at the time. The weapon matched the description of what Gonzalez and Morris said they saw.

Bollinger will be sentenced at a future date by Wheatcraft.