SAVED BY A MISTAKE

Awoman who was abducted, blindfolded and robbed by two men posing as a taxi driver and passenger, escaped a worse fate when she inadvertently gave them a wrong personal identification number (PIN) for her debit card.

Today, almost three months after the ordeal, Marcia is still traumatised, as she can’t help the flashbacks that come with each report of what now appears to be a trend of young women being subjected to a similar nightmare in Kingston and St Catherine.

Marcia, a household worker and mother of five daughters and a son, remembers well the morning of Tuesday, September 8, 2020 as she had a sense of foreboding about leaving her home in the Mountain View area for work.

However, she told the Jamaica Observer in an interview two Sundays ago that she had to take one of her daughters to school on instruction from the administrators.

When they got there, one of the teen’s teachers asked Marcia if she had a device for her daughter. She told the teacher there was one in the house but it was being used by her son. The teacher therefore instructed her to get one, as the school didn’t want the daughter to miss her online classes.

That set them on a journey to downtown Kingston where they eventually went to a Courts store and made a $10,000 down payment on a tablet, leaving her with $16,000 in her bank account.

“I got the receipt, put my daughter on a taxi home, and then took a bus to work,” Marcia explained.

She worked until late the evening. In fact, when she became aware of the time she set about leaving the housing complex. However, because that road is usually ‘lonely’ at night, plus the start of the nightly COVID-19 curfew was approaching, Marcia waited for the female security guard at the complex to avoid walking alone.

Eventually, they got a lift from a friend of the security guard who dropped Marcia off on Trafalgar Road, across from the British High Commission, with the advice to stand near to the mission to ensure her safety.

“I was there waiting, waiting, waiting; no bus, no taxi. One JUTC [Jamaica Urban Transit Company] bus came but it was not in service. I wait, wait and started getting impatient because I didn’t want to be on the road late. Worse, I didn’t want to be in breach of the curfew,” Marcia related.

“Then I saw a white car drive up. The roof light was on and the shout from inside was ‘Mountain View’. So mi look inna di car an mi coulda swear it was a girl in the front passenger seat. So I said, ‘Okay, maybe because it is coming up to curfew time there are probably fewer passengers on the road so the driver has that one girl and me, so him get $200,’ ” Marcia told the Sunday Observer.

“When we drive off I’m looking at the driver and saying to myself, but mi never recall seeing him on my route before. But then, I don’t know every taxi on my route.”

The fact that the driver and passenger were not talking did not make her suspicious either, as she assumed that they did not know each other.

She became a bit concerned after the driver turned the car onto Lady Musgrave Road and started winding up the windows, but she wasn’t too alarmed, given that the road had been recently dug up and she thought that maybe the driver was trying to avoid dust getting into the vehicle.

Shortly after, the passenger reclined the seat.

“By the time mi fi say, ‘Driver, why the passenger a push back the seat’ — because mi a say maybe a him girlfriend — the person kneeled in the seat and faced me with a knife. That was when I realised it was a man,” she said.

“He said, ‘Don’t try fight mi ennuh.’ Mi head start hurt mi. Every part a mi start hurt mi because mi a say, ‘Jesus, a wah kind a trouble dis mi get myself into,’ ” Marcia recalled.

“He said, ‘Just sit back, don’t scream.’ I held up my hands and said ‘I’m not going to do that’. He came across and practically sat on my right leg. I’m now pinned to the door, the seat and him, so there’s nowhere to go.

“He said, ‘I’m going to take this’, which was my bag. He took the bag and placed it on the front seat. He then took out a handkerchief and said, ‘I’m going to put this over your face,’” she related.

She felt when the car turned, after which the driver asked her if she had a credit card. “No,” she answered.

“But you have all these cards in your purse,” the driver retorted.

“I said, ‘yes, but they are not working. You join a bank and you leave but you keep the card.’”

“So what about this one, it look new,” the driver said.

“I knew it was the Scotia card he was talking about because I had just replaced it,” Marcia told the Sunday Observer.

“He said, ‘How much money you have on the card?’

“I said $13,000, but then I said to myself tell him $3,000, so I said, ‘No, no, mi nuh have $13,000, mi have $3,000.’ I started to explain to him that I went to Courts and how much money I paid for the tablet for my daughter. So him say, ‘How mi a go know say yuh did go Courts?’ I told him, ‘The receipt is in my purse and you are in my purse.’ I told him I was supposed to go and pay my water bill, which is $3,000odd, but the machine wasn’t working, it wasn’t taking any cards and I didn’t have any cash and it was the $3,000 on the card to pay.

“I don’t know if he looked at the receipt but he asked me, ‘Wah inna yu bag?’ I told him a bottle of water, which I was drinking and couldn’t finish, a half pack a biscuit, which I was carrying for my son, and my work clothes.

“So him say, ‘Wah kinda work yuh do?’

“Mi say, ‘day’s work’.

“Him say, ‘day’s work?’

“Mi say ‘yes’ and he asked weh you do? an mi tell him,” Marcia recalled with a heavy sigh.

“Then he said, ‘Yuh poor.’ ” She said throughout the interrogation she was praying that no harm would befall her.

The driver then told her that, so far, he believed all that she had told him as he had looked at the receipt in her purse.

He told her that if he took her to an ATM and found more than $3,000 in her account she would be in trouble. She assured him that he wouldn’t find more than that. At that point he asked her for her PIN.

“So I said 1976, not even remembering say a nuh mi PIN number ennuh, but when yuh inna trouble anything a jus’ anything,” Marcia told the Sunday Observer.

“Him say, ‘Jah know, yuh use yuh birthday as yuh PIN number? Yuh know, mi realise say you a big woman, an mi mother born 1976, so fi me violate you dat a go jus’ come in like me a violate mi mother. Hear weh wi a go do, wi a go drop you at a place and when wi drop yu, no mek no alert, jus’ mek wi go ‘bout wi business, an you go ‘bout your own’,” she recalled.

He then put her through another test by asking how much money she had in her purse. When she told him $1,050 he said, “Okay, a dat yu have fi true.”

Another round of interrogation about whether her children were not old enough to help her was conducted as the car kept moving.

“So mi a say to myself, watch

yah now, him a rob mi and interrogate mi, an a now him a go sympathise wid mi, the fact that mi poor,” Marcia shared.

As the car continued moving a range of thoughts raced through the blindfolded woman’s mind. She wondered if the driver’s mother was herself a day’s worker, thus earning her his sympathy; or whether he and his partner would rape or kill her because she had nothing of value to give them.

“Wah kinda a phone yuh have?” interrupted her thoughts.

“A DL 3 and it not even a work,” she responded.

“When I said that, I noticed, through the blindfold, the light come up on the phone, because I told him what happened to the phone. So he realised that I was not lying,” Marcia said.

The car kept moving, and Marcia started worrying that they were not stopping to let her out.

Eventually, the vehicle came to a stop and the knife-wielding passenger told her, “Don’t move, the driver will come roun’ and tek you outta the car.”

After what seemed like an eternity to her, the driver opened the door, his accomplice told her to open her palm and placed her bag in it.

The driver, she said, then asked her to give him her left hand, and while he was helping her out of the car her foot got caught in the seatbelt.

“Tek yuh time, man. No bother hurt yuhself because mi tell you seh mi never did a go hurt you,” he told her.

He warned her against removing the blindfold before he drove away. She assured him she wouldn’t.

When she could no longer hear the engine, Marcia pulled the blindfold off. She had no clue where she was and there was no sign of life in the darkness.

“I saw a building looking like a factory with a big gate and was looking for a security guard so I could call the police, but saw no one,” she said, adding that she started walking in the direction from which the car got to the spot.

Eventually, she saw a private taxi coming towards her. Although the ordeal left her traumatised, she took a chance and beckoned to the driver to stop.

“Him slow down and say, ‘I’m not working.’ So I said, ‘Sir, I don’t need a taxi.’ “

She told him of her ordeal and that she didn’t know where she was.

“He told me to continue in the direction in which I was walking and I will soon start seeing people and then I could go to the Cross Roads Police Station,” she related.

“That’s when I knew I was near Cross Roads.”

However, when she got there she was “too shaken up to go to the police”.

She checked her bag, found that the robbers had taken her phone, but had left her with $150 and the debit card.

The money was enough to get her home in a route taxi which she only boarded after ensuring that a friend of hers was a passenger.

Back in the safety of her house, Marcia’s nine-year-old son asked her how it took her so long to get home as he had been awaiting her arrival.

“That’s when I started to cry,” she shared, adding that she told him that she almost didn’t make it home and related her ordeal.

It brought her daughters to tears.

“It was a wicked ordeal,” Marcia said with a heavy sigh. “For weeks I couldn’t stop crying. I was also feeling pain but couldn’t understand why. People don’t understand that when somebody robs you — yea, dem tek yuh phone and other things, [but] that is not the biggest thing dem tek from you; what they have taken from you is your peace of mind.

“The fact that when I left my yard that morning, only my daughter that I carried with me knew that I had left the house, because the others were sleeping. And while I did look in on them before I left, I never said anything to them.”

“For the whole night I couldn’t sleep. I was there thinking, and then it came to me that 1976 is not my PIN. I just didn’t remember [the PIN]. I just know that when they asked for the PIN it was the first thing that came out of my mouth,” she said.

The following day, her employer informed the bank and got the phone provider to clear the stolen phone.

A few days later Marcia’s daughter received a photo on her phone from her mother’s sister asking if she, Marcia, knew the person in the picture.

“When mi look, nuh di driver. Him put up him picture on mi [Whatsapp] status,” she said, adding that the thief also posted a photo of a woman who she assumed was his girlfriend.

Marcia was eventually put in contact with a policeman who encouraged her to report the matter at a police station because, he said, it was happening “and people don’t know the faces of the robbers”.

She sent the police the photos that her sister sent her, went to Half-way-tree Criminal Investigation Branch, and made the report.

“When the police officers saw the pictures, one of them said to the other, ‘A dem same bwoy yah wi a look fah, ennuh,’ ” she related.

On the day Marcia shared her story with the Observer, she said she had heard on the midday news that a woman abducted in similar circumstances in Portmore and beaten.

“You know how much Tuesday mi nuh go a work because a dat?” she said.

Eventually, she found the courage to return to work on the Tuesday before the interview, but found that she was still traumatised.

“I was walking on the road and a car slowed down to turn. It was a woman driving and she was going about her business, but I got a panic attack. Mi heart start race and mi say, ‘Jesus, weh mi a go run go now?’ Everything dat mi go through start come to mi mind,” she said.

Since then she has had an altercation with a taxi driver who took offence to her looking inside his car before boarding. When she told him of her ordeal apologised, saying he thought she was being difficult.

Now she says she ensures she knows the taxi driver’s face before taking a cab.

“And even if mi know dem face, mi a look inna the back of the car, because yuh nuh safe no weh,” she said.

(Graphic: Rorie Atkinson)