Two University of Otago students had the fright of their lives last Tuesday, when a man chased them in his car before following them into a driveway and menacing them with a baseball bat.
The incident started when the suspect was trying to park his ‘reasonably nice BMW’ on a one-way street. Another vehicle tooted its horn lightly at the man, who mistakenly attributed the noise to the car containing the two girls driving home from their flat shop.
Presumably outraged at the thought of a woman criticising his dismal attempts at parallel parking, the man set off on a chase to catch the girls’ car.
According to an eye-witness the man pulled up alongside the girls and pulled out a baseball bat, waving it out the window theatrically. Realising they may in fact be in danger, the girls pulled into a nearby driveway and ran into the nearest flat. The man parked his car and followed the girls down the driveway, looking in the window of each flat in an attempt to sniff them out. Meanwhile the students wisely locked themselves in the bathroom of the flat into which they had run.
The man then proceeded to patrol the block in his car, waiting for the girls to emerge. Fortunately, a flat across the road had seen the events unfold and called the police. Armed with the suspect’s number plate, police were able to find and arrest the man outside KFC. The man reportedly cooperated with police when he was apprehended.
The man is heading to court on Tuesday, and Critic understands he will be charged with ‘possession of a dangerous weapon’.
One of the victims spoke to Critic, stating that she had no idea what led the man to overreact so badly. “It wasn’t even us that tooted, we were laughing at the fact he thought it was us, which must have pushed him over the edge”. “It’s crazy, he had a nice car and looked relatively normal, so he must have been having a really bad day.”
Critic speculates that the suspect was either on a serious rush of crystal meth, or was simply a Tourism lecturer that had lost the plot after several hours of attempting to make sense of the illiterate drivel handed in by his students.
BMW-driving meth head threatens students with bat after unrelated driver toots lightly at his terrible parking. Critic short on snappy titles this week.
