Joanna Cloonan can’t get her son back, so now, more than anything she just wants peace.
It’s been more than four years since she pulled 6-year-old Aiden Leos from his booster seat, screaming for someone to please help him, as he bled on the side of the 55 Freeway from a gunshot fired by the passenger of another car. She cradled Aiden trying to put pressure on his chest and comfort him.
She’s made it through eulogizing her only son, burying him and watching Marcus Eriz, the man who shot Aiden, be sentenced to 40 years to life in prison. She’s tried to work toward forgiveness, saying that it’s what her young son would have wanted.
And while she knows she’ll never be the same, Cloonan holds out hope that eventually the days will be easier to get through, though it seems a long away off. But first she’ll have to confront her son’s death once again in a whole new venue: civil court.
Aiden’s father, Jose Leos Jr., is suing her in Orange County Superior Court alleging wrongful death and unjust enrichment. The lawsuit, which also names Eriz, his girlfriend at the time, Wynne Lee, and Cloonan’s mother, was filed in 2023, and Cloonan was served with papers last October.
“It’s torture,” Cloonan said. “No mother should see a child be hurt that way and then to have people turn on you.”
Just before the shooting, Aiden had been dancing to “Good Vibrations” by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch and happily eating french toast in the backseat of his mom’s Chevolet as she drove north on the 55 to his Yorba Linda kindergarten.
Then an exchange with another driver changed everything.
Lee, who also was on the freeway driving a white Volkswagen, cut Cloonan off in the carpool lane, forcing her to hit the brakes. Lee flashed her a peace sign that Cloonan interpreted as sarcastic.
Cloonan continued behind the Volkswagen for a short distance, eventually exited the carpool lane to get off the freeway, and extended her middle finger at the other car as she passed. Eriz, who was sitting in the passenger seat of the Volkswagen, pulled out a Glock 17 pistol, rolled down the window and fired a single shot at Cloonan’s car.
The bullet entered the trunk a few inches from the license plate, then passed through the vehicle’s rear seat and Aiden’s plastic booster seat before hitting him in the back and piercing his liver, lung and heart.
He was pronounced dead within the hour.
“It was unbelievable helplessness within just seconds, and I was just talking to him,” Cloonan recalled. “You don’t even have time to think.”
Lee and Eriz continued north on their journey to work while Cloonan pulled to the side of the freeway, unstrapped her son and screamed for help. An off-duty police officer found them minutes later and performed CPR until he could carry Aiden to an ambulance that took him to Children’s Hospital of Orange County where he was pronounced dead.
The shooting led to a weeks-long manhunt and stunned motorists, prompting conversations about the potential dangers of engaging with other drivers in Southern California, where the specter of freeway violence occasionally bubbles to the surface.
After his arrest, Eriz told investigators he wasn’t angry when he pulled the trigger. His attorney, Deputy Public Defender Randall Bethune, described it to jurors as “a momentary lapse of reason by a 24-year-old guy who had very little life experience.”
Cloonan got her share of hate online as well, with some saying she provoked the killing, which is essentially the same claim in Leos’ lawsuit against her.
According to the civil complaint, “it is reasonably foreseeable that if [Cloonan] had not engaged in dangerous acts of road rage, and no shots would have been fired by [Eriz], as a direct retaliation for [Cloonan’s] act of road rage … Aiden Leos would still be alive.”
But Cloonan doesn’t see it that way.
“Honestly, that day it felt like Satan came out of nowhere and attacked us,” she said. “Nothing made sense. I know I’m not to blame. I did nothing to hurt my son. In my six years of knowing that beautiful soul, I did everything I could to protect him — everything.”
The relationship between Cloonan and Leos, Aiden’s father, was strained long before the lawsuit and their son’s tragic death, Cloonan said, and fraught with emotional and physical abuse.
Records show she filed for a restraining order against Leos in 2019, which Cloonan said was a result of domestic violence. Orange County prosecutors said records in that case are sealed to the public. Neither Leos nor his attorney returned requests for comment.
In April 2019, Cloonan was granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting Leos from contacting her or Aiden. In the document she describes an incident in May 2017 in which Leos allegedly “pounded [her] head against the floor several times,” resulting in a concussion. Cloonan later withdrew the request for a permanent restraining order and instead sought mediation, court records show.
After that, she said, the pair tried co-parenting Aiden, but Cloonan took on the majority of the duties, like taking him to the doctor and purchasing all of his necessities like clothes and shoes.
Cloonan said Leos arrived at the hospital after Aiden died. She was sitting next to Aiden holding his small hand when Leos entered and forced her to leave the room, she said.
“Those were my last moments to hold him, and he took that from me,” she said.
She said that was the last time she’d heard from him, until she was served with court papers.
In his lawsuit, Leos alleges that after Aiden’s death, Cloonan’s mother started a GoFundMe to raise money for the boy’s funeral and help compensate the parents for their grief. He claims the GoFundMe raised about $500,000 but he didn’t receive any of the funds. Cloonan says they never spoke about it and she never promised him any money. She said he received money from a separate GoFundMe that she was not involved with.
Leos is suing for unspecified general and compensatory damages and costs of the lawsuit.
Attorney Mike Caspino, who is representing Cloonan pro bono, called the lawsuit an “outrageous abuse of the justice system.”
Leos’ attorney explained in an August 2024 court filing that the case had been slowed by Leos moving to Texas, then Hawaii after his son’s death.
“For the last several months I did have some difficulty in contacting my client and was unaware of his new address,” the filing said. “I have experienced this type of communication problems with some clients in the past who are driven by their despair at such a great loss in their life.”
Separately, Cloonan recently received a letter from an insurance company representing the Volkswagen’s driver’s father about a “bodily injury” claim that was filed in October. She doesn’t know what the claim is alleging but is repulsed by the entire situation, saying “what more do they want to take from me?”
Lee’s father could not be reached for comment.
Clutching a tan teddy bear to her chest, fighting back tears inside her lawyer’s Orange County office, Cloonan detailed what life has been like without Aiden during a recent interview.
“I have not had any peace since my son died,” she said.
She can’t work. She doesn’t sleep normal hours and many days she struggles to get out of bed. When she finds herself awake early in the morning, long before sunrise, she’ll pray. At first it was an attempt to be closer to Aiden and it’s grown to become a source of comfort.
She still can hear Aiden’s laugh — a full-body experience that only her cheerful little boy could deliver. She still can picture them dancing together and almost can feel his warmth as they cuddled reading dinosaur books, or the joy they felt adventuring to the park to hunt for spiders and other bugs.
The tattered stuffed animal, which her son lovingly named Beary, has been on this journey of grief with Cloonan. For a year after the boy’s death the bear rode in one of Aiden’s old car seats in the back of her car, just so the space wouldn’t feel so empty. A photo of Aiden is pinned to the bear’s chest, his cherubic cheeks a representation of the brief childhood period between toddler and big kid.
“He was my best friend. He was my buddy. In a lot of ways, in my childlike heart, it just was like soulmates, and that’s gone,” she said. “I’ll never get that back.”
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