Oakland woman warns neighbors after evading potential carjacker
OAKLAND -- An Oakland woman who says she very narrowly avoided being carjacked is speaking out and urging her neighbors to think about how they would react if they found themselves in a similar situation.
"There are just those times when you get that creepy feeling on the back of your neck and you think something is not right here," said Elizabeth Gage.
Gage, who is a retired educator, said she got that hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling Saturday while driving home from the grocery store. She says a black Mercedes with tinted windows and no license plate started to tailgate after she crossed through the intersection of Keller Avenue and Mountain Boulevard.
Oakland Police said another driver was carjacked at gunpoint Tuesday morning at that very intersection. Elizabeth said it's not lost on her how close she came to peril herself.
"At first, I kept saying, 'You're being paranoid. The whole world is not following you.' And then I realized, 'Oh my God, this man really is following me,'" she said.
She says the car mirrored every move she made. She sped up, it sped up. She changed lanes, it changed lanes.
It was after that realization that she was being followed that she made a decision. She bypassed the turn onto her street, deciding not to lead her pursuers to her home where she would be effectively trapped.
"I was saying it out loud, 'OK, you're not going to go home. What are you going to do?'"
Gage said she called 911, waited on hold and jumped back on the freeway. The car followed. Eventually, however, she said she was able to elude her pursuers and returned home, thankful she'd listened to that little voice of caution in her head.
"To see that it had no license plates and to see that it had tinted windows immediately by feelers went up," she said.