A Melbourne mum who was kidnapped and forced to drive to stores and buy computers while a man armed with a knife sat next to her baby daughter has detailed the terrifying ordeal.
Kieren parked her Suzuki S Cross at the Stud Park Shopping Centre supermarket carpark in Rowville last Friday at 6pm to get some groceries from Woolworths and was taking her daughter out of the baby seat when a stranger approached.
“He just came up out of nowhere behind me with a knife and just said: ‘Get in your car and drive’,” Kieren said.
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“I just remember begging: ‘I’ve got a daughter. You can have my car, my wallet, my phone. Take everything and leave me with my daughter’.
“He said he didn’t want my phone and to get in the car and drive. I don’t know how long we stood there for, but I ended up getting in the car, and he got in the back seat with my daughter.”
Once they started driving, the man told Kieren to head towards Lynbrook and repeatedly told her, and her baby, to stop crying.
“I ended up feeling really sick, so we pulled over so I could throw up,” she said.
The mother said they then switched seats, and she managed to get her baby to sleep, before they stopped at the first electrical store on the South Gippsland Hwy in Cranbourne, and he told her to go in and buy Apple MacBooks.
Kieren said she asked him if she could take her daughter, and he refused and promised her he wouldn’t drive away.
Having no choice but to hope he was telling the truth, she went in and purchased the computers.
By this point, Kieren’s husband had tried to call repeatedly and had started tracking her through her phone as he knew something was wrong.
Her husband caught up with the car when they reached the second set of shops in Dandenong.
“He tried to confront us and I remember yelling at my husband that he has a knife and I didn’t want him to get hurt,” Kieren said.
“My husband tried to save my daughter, but he couldn’t as the door was locked, and she was in a car seat.
“I’d already thought through the possibility of taking her from the car seat and running, but those seats aren’t made for quick exiting.”
Kieren said she was forced to continue on the terrifying journey, and the offender later threw her phone out of the window.
“My poor husband got an incident alert on his phone saying my phone was in a crash, and so he thought the worst,” she said.
The man then drove Kieren’s car to Robert Booth Reserve in Dandenong and told her “that was it” and to take her daughter home. Kieren immediately sought help from a nearby strip of shops.
The mother said she managed to stay calm towards the end as she knew her husband would have alerted the police and that some of the shopkeepers in the electrical stores also noticed Kieren was not OK and may have raised the alarm.
“He told me he wasn’t going to hurt my daughter, as he had a niece her age. I just had to believe that he wasn’t going to hurt us by the end,” she said.
“He apologised for ruining my night, but it’s definitely had longer lasting impacts, and I don’t think he realised that. It’s turned my life upside down for now.
“It’s a lot to handle.”
Detective Senior Constable Jonathan Minehan said the offender had been loitering in the carpark for up to an hour before he targeted Kieren.
“To put a young family though a protracted and very traumatic incident ... It baffles me that someone could behave in this manner,” he said.
“It’s absolutely impressive to see how courageous she’s been to ultimately keep herself and her baby safe. It’s admirable.”
The kidnapping is being treated as an isolated incident, but police have stepped up patrols in the area.
The offender is described by police as Asian in appearance and aged between 20 and 35 years old.
At the time, he was wearing a grey hoodie with the hood over his head, a green fluro vest and grey pants with black shoes and was carrying the computers in their boxes.
Police released CCTV images of the man and have urged anyone with information to contact them.
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