Man with knife robs woman in parking lot

Victim has minor injuries; police have not ID’D suspect.

An Atlanta woman recently fell prey to the desperations of a violent mugger trying to escape town. A man sneaked into the 59-year-old’s vehicle after she shopped at a Home Depot in northeast Atlanta and robbed her at knifepoint.

According to a police report, the man was intent on making it out of state and robbed the woman of cash for bus fare.

Now Atlanta police are investigating the attack, which occurred shortly before noon Feb. 24 in the parking lot outside a Home Depot at 2525 Piedmont Road.

No arrests had been made in the case as of Thursday, and investigators had yet to identify the suspect.

The victim told officers she came out of the hardware store after shopping and loaded her items into her trunk. When she popped the lock on her SUV and got into her driver’s seat, the suspect sneaked into her vehicle on the passenger’s side and sat right beside her, according to the report. She said he stuck a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her, demanding she give him cash and take him to a bus station.

The victim was interviewed by Channel 2 Action News on Wednesday but asked not to be identified.

“(It was) like a hunting kind of knife in his right hand that came straight to my throat and told me that he was going to kill me,” she told the news station. “He kept telling me he was going to kill me.”

The woman told officers she tried to escape, but the robber locked the doors and grabbed her arm to prevent her from leaving. She spent the next 10 minutes locked inside the SUV, she told Channel 2.

The woman said she tried to talk her assailant down and told him he wasn’t going to kill her at one stage of the violent encounter. But the man insisted he would if she didn’t adhere to his demands, the report stated.

At one point, the suspect mentioned that he needed to get to Alabama, the report said. He told the victim he was trying to buy a bus ticket.

When the woman opened her wallet, the suspect took all the cash and grabbed a gold medallion necklace from around her neck, then got out of the vehicle.

That’s when the victim said she was finally able to get out and scream for help.

“There were all these people there, and I’m screaming and yelling and bleeding, and nobody did anything,” the woman told Channel 2.

The victim said the suspect walked toward Piedmont Road. Investigators canvassed the area but weren’t able to locate the man, the report stated.

The suspect was described as a skinny man, 6 feet tall, wearing a gray hat, blue jean jacket and white pants at the time of the alleged attack, according to police. The victim said the knife had a blade about 6 inches long.

Police said the woman sustained minor stab wounds on her right breast and left hand, lacerations she got while struggling to wrestle away from the suspect. She did not need to be hospitalized, the report said.

Investigators were hoping to find clues from surveillance cameras surrounding the parking lot. A police spokesperson on Thursday said the footage couldn’t be released as the investigation is ongoing.

It’s not the first time a customer has had a brush with violence outside the Home Depot in the Lindbergh Plaza shopping mall.

Georgia State University professor Volkan Topalli, a longtime criminologist who researches urban violence, was shopping for potting soil May 15 when shots rang out from a nearby apartment complex.

A stray bullet struck Topalli in the hardware store’s parking lot and fractured a bone in his arm, The Atlanta Journal-constitution previously reported. Topalli described the shooting as a “one-in-abillion bad luck event.”