Naked woman armed with gun opens fire at passing cars on busy NorCal bridge

OAKLAND, Calif. -- A naked woman armed with a gun opened fire into oncoming traffic on a busy bridge in Northern California Tuesday.

The shooting happened on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. No injuries were reported, and the woman was taken into custody.

Michael Crawford and his co-worker Alex were on their way back to the East Bay region after work and came across a car parked sideways, blocking multiple lanes of traffic.

"I heard the pop, like I saw her walking around and I heard (pop) and I was like 'Oh, that's a gun, that's actually a gun.' So I heard it before I saw it," Crawford said.

They noticed a woman, not wearing any clothes, firing a weapon into oncoming traffic.

"Like what am I supposed to do right now?" Crawford said. "What am I supposed to do? Like how do I get out of here, we can't just stay here, we're sitting ducks, we have nothing but a windshield protecting us."

The California Highway Patrol says around 4:40 p.m., callers reported a reckless driver heading eastbound on the bridge.

At one point, she stopped on the bridge, got out of her car and started yelling at other drivers with a knife in her hand. But she got back in the car, passed a toll plaza approaching the 880 Interchange and got out for a second time.

"She was yelling at other vehicles, she began firing shots into the air, and then as other vehicles appeared to be kind of confused as to what was happening - maybe thinking there was a crash and they were trying to drive around it," CHP spokesperson Officer Andrew Barclay said. "As they were trying to drive around, she started firing rounds towards those other vehicles."

CHP says their officers were able to safely de-escalate the situation, convince her to drop the weapon and give up.

She was taken to the hospital for a physical and psychiatric evaluation and remains on a 72-hour hold at the hospital.

"While we know that this is someone experiencing a mental health crisis, we also have a crime scene that we need to handle because there are rounds that have been fired. We need to process that scene," Barclay said.

The dangerous and bizarre scene caused serious traffic delays for drivers.