A mother and her baby were allegedly abducted from a Melbourne shopping centre by a knife-wielding man who then forced the woman to drive to electronic stores to buy laptops.
Victoria police are hunting for the man after the incident in Rowville, in Melbourne’s south-east, on 10 May.
The alleged victim said she was terrified the offender would hurt her six-month-old daughter during the ordeal.
She was getting out of a silver Suzuki S-Cross in the car park at the Stud Park shopping centre at about 6pm when the man approached her, police said.
Police allege he threatened her with a knife and forced her into the driver’s seat of the car.
The man allegedly got into the back seat with the woman’s child, and told her to drive to electrical stores and demanded she buy him Apple MacBooks, police claim.
The stores included one on the South Gippsland Highway in Cranbourne and one on Frankston-Dandenong Rd in Dandenong.
While the woman went into each store, the man stayed in the car with her baby, according to police.
The woman then got into the back seat and the man drove from the Dandenong store to Robert Booth Reserve, where he left the car and fled.
The woman said she was terrified he would drive off with the baby while she was inside the stores.
“I was just so worried in a panic that he would drive away with her inside and he didn’t, I was thankful for that,” she told reporters on Friday.
She said she tried to de-escalate the situation by being nice to her alleged abductor but felt so sick at one point she had to pull over to vomit.
“All I can remember hearing was my daughter crying, he was trying to get her to calm down and I was trying to get him to calm down, we were both crying,” she said.
Her husband was allegedly able to track her location by her phone and caught up with the car at the second store where he unsuccessfully tried to stop the abduction.
“I just remember yelling at my husband that he has a knife and that I just didn’t want him to get hurt,” she said.
She said the man told her he was a nurse and would not hurt her daughter as she was the same age as his niece.
“I had to believe he wasn’t going to hurt us in the end,” she said.
She said she has only left her house once since the alleged abduction, and was fearful the man knows information about her as he had her wallet in the car.
He was last seen after 8pm that day on the Dandenong Creek path, carrying four laptops.
The woman and her child were not physically injured during the ordeal.
Police are asking anyone with information about the man, who is of Asian appearance and aged between 20 and 35, to contact Crime Stoppers.
He was wearing a grey hoodie, green fluorescent vest and black or grey pants with black running shoes at the time.