She Picked Up A Woman Who Was Hitchhiking, And Things Took A Strange Turn When A Van Started Following Closely Behind Her
When this woman was 52, she was driving to a job assignment that was out of town and stopped at a gas station to take a break, buy a snack, and fill up her car.
While at the gas station, a woman with a developmental disability in her mid-20s approached her. The woman needed a ride to a nearby town, and apparently, the person she’d been riding with had left her while she was in the restroom.
The woman was understandably worried because she didn’t have a cell phone and didn’t have any emergency phone numbers that she could call if she borrowed someone else’s phone.
Inside the gas station, she asked the employees, and they verified that the woman had told them the same story about her ride abandoning her. They told her that the woman had been asking people for a ride for about an hour by this point.
“I then made the decision to do something I’ve never done before: offer a stranger a ride,” she said.
She wasn’t going to the town the woman needed to go to, but she was going in the same direction. She offered to drop the woman off at a grocery store in the next town, and then she would continue on to her destination for her work assignment.
Her reasoning for this was that the grocery store in the next town was incredibly busy, so she thought that the woman would have an easier time finding someone else to give her a ride the rest of the way to the town she needed to get to.
Plus, she’d only be five miles away from her destination versus the 25 miles away she currently was at this gas station. If the woman needed to, she’d be able to walk the five miles if she couldn’t find anyone to give her a ride.
The woman agreed to the plan, and they drove off toward the grocery store in the next town. Immediately, she noticed that a van was following them. No matter what she did, the van followed close behind the entire time, even occasionally speeding up to get closer.
Chanakon – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
Then, the woman asked to play on her phone. She told the woman no, that her phone wasn’t a toy, and that she needed it for work. She then moved the phone out of the woman’s reach.
All of a sudden, the woman said that she remembered her boyfriend’s phone number and asked to call him. At the time, cars weren’t able to sync up to phones with voice activation.
Since there were signs everywhere saying that there was no cell phone use allowed while driving, she told the woman that they could call her boyfriend once they got to the grocery store parking lot.
The woman was immediately angry and said that she wanted her to take her home. She told the woman that she couldn’t do that, and she had to be at a work assignment starting soon.
As the woman got madder, the van continued following them as closely as possible.
Finally, at 4 p.m., they reached the grocery store parking lot, with the van pulling in as well. Just like she’d predicted, the store was busy, but when she asked the woman for her boyfriend’s phone number, the woman suddenly couldn’t remember anymore. She also refused to get out of the car and started fighting with her.
“There’s a sheriff’s deputy parked nearby, and I roll down my window and signal that I need to speak to him. He walks over and asks me what’s going on,” she explained.
She told the deputy the story of where she’d met the woman and how the woman wouldn’t get out of her car. Then, she whispered to him that there was a van that had been following them.
The deputy told the woman that she needed to get out of the car, which she obeyed, albeit slowly.
“I ask once more for her boyfriend’s number, and she says, ‘You’re crazy. I don’t have a boyfriend. Oh, look, there are my friends now,’ and she points to the van,” she continued.
At that, she and the deputy looked at one another, and he asked her for her contact information. He said that he would stall the woman and her friends for 20 minutes so that he could run their license and registration. He also wanted to talk to the woman’s friends and scold them for abandoning a special needs adult.
The deputy told her to leave and that he’d check back in with her before the end of his shift, and he warned her, “‘Don’t pick up any more hitchhikers.'”
At last, she left and went to her work assignment. The deputy called to verify that she reached her destination safely, and he said that he was keeping tabs on the people who owned the van.
He also informed her that he got in touch with a co-worker at the sheriff’s department for the county where she had her work assignment, and she could expect to be contacted within a couple of days.
She never learned anything more about the outcome of the deputy’s findings or what became of the woman and her friends driving the van.
Her worst fear is that she will see a true crime show about the woman and her gang of friends robbing and hurting people.
What would you have done if you were in her shoes?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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