[Image: YouTube / News24]
Sarah Scott thought her Uber had arrived outside her friend’s Hyde Park home. She stepped out to meet it—only to find herself at the centre of a chilling attempted kidnapping.
As the car door flung open, a man inside delivered a terrifying command: “You’re coming with us tonight, lady.” But Scott wasn’t going down without a fight.
A primal instinct took over. “I just was, like, this is not my story. This is not going to go down in my history book,” Scott – a 44-year-old South African living in Tanzania who had come home for a two-week holiday – told News24.
Elbows striking, body thrashing, she fought with everything she had. Her sheer resistance forced her would-be captors to abandon their plan, jumping back into the car and speeding off.
Security footage captured the harrowing ordeal, unfolding just before 8 PM on Friday.
Scott had been staying with her friend Elizabeth Wallis in the wealthy Sandton suburb and never thought that she would need to fight for her life like she did that night.
That fateful Friday night, as she waited for her Uber, she noticed a suspicious car flashing its lights. The license plate didn’t match her app’s details. At the same time, she watched a man in his 20s approach. When the car veered toward her instead of continuing down the road, and the man lunged towards her, she knew something was wrong.
When she was grabbed from behind, her phone screen cracked from the force of her grip as she struggled. The man in the car—dressed in a leather jacket—tried to pull her in, but Scott’s relentless fight and guttural screams made them reconsider. They fled.
That man, who was dressed in a leather jacket and was sitting in the back seat of the car, was terrifying, Scott says. When she heard him say that she was coming with them, she responded with what she described as a lion’s roar.
“I didn’t scream from my throat. I screamed from my belly, and I didn’t just scream once. I repeatedly screamed, and I elbowed him. Luckily, I’m strong. I elbowed him and wriggled around toward the back of the car … the guy jumped in the car and drove off.”
Shaken but unharmed, Scott returned inside as security guards arrived. When her actual Uber driver called, he was unaware of the chaos outside, raising disturbing questions about how the timing of the fake Uber had aligned so precisely.
Uber South Africa expressed sympathy and promised an investigation, while police confirmed a case of attempted kidnapping had been opened. Yet, crucial security footage had yet to be retrieved, prompting scrutiny of law enforcement’s response.
Wallis said she still had questions about how the attempted kidnapping happened within the few minutes that her friend was waiting for her Uber to arrive.
“We couldn’t see from her Uber app where the car had been because she couldn’t trace the history, because the trip had never started. We couldn’t see where the car had come from or where he stopped,” she said. “But the more I thought about it, I think it’s just too coincidental for her to be checking for her car at the moment when this other car drives down the road and looks like an Uber, within the same three-minute timeframe of her seeing the car arrive.
“The whole sequence was too aligned. I don’t know if these guys would have got that lucky. It just seems very unlikely to me.”
Scott, reflecting on her escape, was clear: “Maybe they just wanted to take me to an ATM. But maybe not. I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.”
Now, she speaks out—not just for herself, but for others.
“I know now that I can survive something like this because of the strength I have inside myself – and, my mother will say, because of all her prayers.”
Both Wallis and Scott said they hoped the attempted kidnapping – and how it happened – would be properly investigated by both Uber and the police.
Chillingly, Scott’s attempted kidnapping happened days before radio and TV host Anele Mdoda posted that she had been threatened with rape by an Uber driver in Cape Town after she indicated on the app that she preferred not to speak to him.
View this post on Instagram
Indeed, Uber and SAPS need to step up before this gets completely out of hand.
[Source: News24]
