Rebecca Meyer
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.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox.
