Horror moment car taken with kids inside
A woman has been charged after a mother and father faced a nightmare ordeal when their car with their two young children in the back seat was allegedly stolen from a service station on Christmas Day.
The father was fuelling up the couple’s Nissan Pathfinder at a service station in the Logan suburb of Beenleigh on Monday when a man allegedly pushed the 26-year-old mother out of the front passenger seat before speeding off.
CCTV shows the pair scrambling after the incident, the mother on the ground screaming “my kids” as the father runs towards the store before re-entering the screen with his mobile phone to his ear.
The parents, who can’t be identified for legal reasons, were left worrying about the fate of their children for more than 15 minutes.
The couple were in shock, the father said.
“She (the mother) was really distraught,” he said.
“She was losing her marbles a bit. I was just in shock more than anything else.
“I didn’t know where to go from here.”
The footage shows the father trying to enter the vehicle’s passenger seat to stop the man before toppling back out of the car with his wife.
“From the force of the vehicle taking off, we both just fell to the ground,” he said.
The children, a 10-month-old girl and a two-year-old boy, were dropped at a nearby Woolworths a short time later unharmed.
“All (our son) could say to me pretty much was that you know, ‘there was a bad man, and the bad man was angry’,” the father said.
Another vehicle’s dashcam footage shows the Pathfinder being driven erratically a short time later.
On Thursday, a 20-year-old Holmview woman was charged with assault occasioning bodily harm; two counts each of unlawful entry of vehicle for committing indictable offence, threatened violence, and stealing; three counts each of unlawful entry of a motor vehicle, common assault, possessing a dangerous drug; and five counts each of receiving tainted property, and fraud.
She’s due before Beenleigh Magistrates Court on January 25.
Police are still hunting the man seen in the footage, who is also believed to have assaulted a 26-year-old woman before trying to steal her Mazda CX-5 from a City Rd 7-Eleven shortly before the theft of the Pathfinder about 4.45pm.
Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000, or to make a report online.
