In emergency situations, the police try to arrive as quickly as possible. In some cases, however, that’s not quick enough. Sometimes, civilians have to take matters into their own hands and deal with criminals the best they can.
A New York woman recently made a bold decision when her car was overtaken by a carjacker.
Tihisha Jones, 49, was letting her car run to warm the engine up before driving her son to school. Then she suddenly noticed that her car wasn’t unoccupied — a man was sitting in the front seat.
The suspect was Bernardo Santiago, 19.
Jones and her son began to walk toward the car. Jones said she saw Santiago trying to turn the ignition in her car and it was clear to her what was going on.
Jones wasn’t afraid to pull the passenger door open to have it out with him. But Santiago closed the door on her, at which point Jones ran around to the driver’s side and hauled him out onto the pavement.
She held him to the ground by his shirt while she waited for the authorities. Santiago made an attempt to remove his shirt and escape. At that point, Jones used her entire body to hold him to the ground. Eventually, NYPD officers arrived on the scene.
Video of the incident was captured by Jones’ neighbor.
The video shows Jones pulling Santiago from the car while her 5-year-old son looks on, then slamming him to the ground.
“Welcome to the [expletive] Bronx,” ays the neighbor with a laugh.
Jones says her motivation was that she had worked extremely hard to get her car, a 2005 Honda Pilot. She wasn’t planning on letting anyone drive away with it. What’s more, she was already on her guard after a slew of vandalism and theft from her car. Just in the previous two weeks, someone broke out a window and stole one of her spoilers.
“I had to take matters into my own hands because I work,” said Jones. “I saved to get that car myself.”
Santiago told police he had mistaken Jones’ car for his Uber.
He’s now facing multiple charges, including attempted grand larceny, petty larceny, and criminal possession of stolen property. The video footage of the moment is below.
There’s no doubt that Jones is a gutsy woman. But she’s not the only one who has gone to extreme lengths to prevent her vehicle from being carjacked. Back in 2017 in Milwaukee, one woman lept onto her car’s hood to stop a carjacker from driving off.
Melissa Smith was parked at a gas station when a man jumped into her car and attempted to drive away.
Furious, she ran after the car and leaped onto the hood. The carjacker’s reaction was to laugh, which Smith said made her even angrier and more determined to foil his plans. He also hit the brakes multiple times in an attempt to throw her off of the car. He also turned on the windshield wipers.
Smith clung on to the car as tightly as she could, every acceleration throwing her up over the windshield.
Smith was eventually successful in deterring the thief, who ran to another car and fled the scene.
But she admits that it may not have been the smartest move.
“Isn’t the smartest safety thing, but went with my instinct,” said Smith. “I was screaming at him. I pounded on the windshield a couple of times. He, in turn, laughed at me.”
Smith immediately jumped off of her car’s hood and tried to stop it as it rolled into traffic. Fortunately, she was able to keep it from hitting anyone or anything else. But while she was distracted, the would-be car thief escaped in a getaway car that was waiting for him.
“It’s definitely not how I thought I would have reacted,” said Smith. “But it’s what I did. If I held onto the side, I knew he could just drag me and leave. But with me on top … I don’t know, I just thought, ‘this is what I’m doing, you are not leaving with my car, I am not dealing with this sorta crap today’.”
But Smith admitted that her actions weren’t exactly safe.
She also said that her fiancé was shocked when she told him what had happened, and even more shocked when he saw the security video that captured the whole thing. She says the ordeal wasn’t a matter of clear thought and she doesn’t even know what was going through her mind — it was all a matter of instinct.
One thing is certain: carjackers better watch out whose car they decide to steal.
Watch the footage below.
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