Woman shares experience of carjacking attempt in Modesto

“I try to look around and be observant. I could tell you what and who I saw when I was in the store and when I walked out of the store.” But a few seconds of distraction were all it took to make a woman the victim of an attempted carjacking Monday night.

The woman – her name is being withheld by The Modesto Bee – is a former Modestan who was in town visiting her parents. About 10:30 p.m., she came out of the Walgreens store at Standiford Avenue and Carver Road.

She got in her pickup and started it. “Simultaneously, my phone went off.” She was checking a text message when “it caught my eye in the mirror that someone was walking by. No sooner did I see him than he had pulled the door open. ‘B----, get the f--- out of your truck.’”

The man – she described him as Latino or a darker-complexioned Caucasian, about 5 foot 9 and wearing a baseball cap, blue shirt and blue jeans – told her he had a gun. Quickly scanning him up and down, she saw he had something under his shirt, but it may have been just his hand.

“I thought, ‘Screw this,’ and with my left hand on the wheel and my right hand on the shifter, I sped away with the door open,” the woman said. “Thankfully, nobody was parked in front of me.”

She left the parking lot and pulled into a neighborhood off Carver, where she asked a couple of residents to watch over her as she turned on her dome light to look for her phone, which she feared might have fallen out of the truck.

The phone still was with her, and within about three minutes of the crime, she estimated, she called police. When officers responded to the Walgreens, though, they found no one matching the man’s description.

Did the woman make the right decision by hitting the gas?

“Heck, yeah, I would beat feet, too,” said Modesto Police Department spokeswoman Heather Graves. “Obviously, she didn’t think it was a big enough threat to stay (and surrender her truck). Even if he threatened a gun, apparently he didn’t produce one.”

If the man had done so, it would have been a different story, Graves said. “If they have someone at gunpoint, clearly, give them what they want. I would not recommend fighting over it. Lives are not replaceable, things are – cars, your keys, your wallet.”

The victim said she learned lessons from the crime that she wants people to know.

“I don’t want to say that there’s not anywhere safe anymore, but it was not a crazy-late hour or in a dark environment,” she said. “How many of us run to Walgreens or someplace at 10 at night to get Tylenol for our kids?”

And like many of us, the woman drives a vehicle with door locks that engage automatically when it begins moving and has grown accustomed to letting those doors lock automatically. “I probably will begin to lock the doors (manually),” she said. It also occurred to her later that although she does carry pepper spray, “Where was it? On my keychain, in the ignition,” where it did her no good in this instance.

The attempted carjacking “really disheartened me in my sweet little Modesto,” said the woman, who grew up here and graduated from Davis High, about a mile and a quarter from where she was attacked. “It really startled me that people are doing that here.”

It doesn’t just happen here, Graves said, it happens “quite a bit.”

“Any time we’re distracted, it opens us up to becoming a victim,” she said. “That’s what criminals look for. We need to be aware, constantly scanning our surroundings. We had a lady last week who had her purse snatched from a guy in the mall parking lot. He did not even get out of his car.” He just rolled up alongside her, reached out his car window and grabbed it as she walked.

“They don’t have to work hard to be a criminal anymore,” Graves said. “We kind of give them what they need because we become complacent, we don’t think it’s going to happen to us, like we live in a protective bubble.

“We women love to carry a ginormous purse. I know I do. It’s beautiful and we love it. But we also want to text, to look down at our phones. And doing that, we can’t pay attention to what’s happening around us.”

Yes, the point of a mobile phone is that it’s mobile – we can use it when and where we need to (except when driving). But “I would say at any time,” Graves said, “it’s a good idea to get to wherever you’re coming from to your vehicle and then to your destination without letting a cellphone, book or whatever else take your attention.”

This story was originally published April 7, 2015 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Woman shares experience of carjacking attempt in Modesto."