As she drove past Farm Cove Intermediate School, she said she could see a man standing in the middle of the road.
“All I saw, because it was very dark at that time of the morning... was this figure standing in the middle of the road.”
She said she stopped because she thought it was a person walking across the road.
“He went straight to my passenger door, front door, and tried to get in the car.”
The woman said she was lucky because she locked her car doors “religiously” before setting off on journeys for safety.
“Even if my husband’s in the car with me, I still lock the doors and just as well I did.
“That’s what the scary thing was, thinking about what could have been.”
The woman said that because the man couldn’t get in her car, he climbed on to the bonnet while she drove around a roundabout at the bottom of Glenmore Rd.
She said she was trying to “get him to sort of slide off the bonnet, but that didn’t work” and braked hard about four times.
The woman told the Herald she was trying to “dislodge him from the front, but I couldn’t and the whole time he’s kind of looking at me and sort of saying, ‘please, please’.”
She said at one stage he said, “my life’s in danger”.
“Then in the next breath, he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got six kids’.”
She said the man was loud enough to be heard through the closed windows.
“At one stage going up, Glenmore, in my rear vision mirror, I spotted a sort of work vehicle coming up behind me, so I wound my window down and put my hand up, like, stop, but he didn’t, he just passed me.”
The woman said that by the time she got to the top of Glenmore Rd, she had phoned 111 and was talking with police while the man was still on the bonnet.
The woman told the police where she was located so they could help.
She said she got to the corner of Tī Rākau Drive and Pakūranga Rd when the man told her he was going to get off, “so he slid off the bonnet”.
She confirmed the man was not hurt during the ordeal and came to her window and said, “thank you”.
“I thought, what’s he thanking me for? I did everything I could to dislodge him from my bonnet.”
The woman said the police asked her where the man went, and she said “he’s on this corner, but he’s now approaching another car, and at that stage my light went green, so I left and drove, very scared going to work”.
The woman said police rang her and said the man got into another car.
She was concerned that the other person may not have had their doors locked. “I just hope that driver is okay.”
“That made me think even more like what if my car was unlocked ... and I just didn’t want to go there,” she said.
She drove to work because she was too scared to turn around, she said.
The woman said she has been “a nervous wreck” since the incident and would change the route she takes to work from now on.
The woman made a post to her local Facebook page to urge women to keep their car doors locked at all times.
The police said they received a report at 6.11am on Thursday, May 15, of a man acting suspiciously.
Police said there were no reports of threats or damage to the complainant’s vehicle.
“The male got off the vehicle on Pakūranga Rd and was reported to have been picked up by another vehicle.”
Police said they attended the scene and carried out extensive area inquiries but were unable to locate the man or the vehicle he got into.
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