Some quick thinking on the part of a 13-year-old Michigan girl might just have saved her from being kidnapped Saturday.
WJBK News reports the girl was walking to her grandmother’s house in the city of Pontiac when she was approached by a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
“Some man yelled at me, he was like, ‘Hey,’” she told the news station. “I turned around and I started speed-walking. And then he ran behind me and pulled me back into the bushes.”
The girl, who was not named in the news report, said the man grabbed her arm and tried to pull her off the sidewalk.
“I was scared,” she said. “He just pulled me into the bushes and kept saying ‘come on.’”
The teen told WJBK she kicked the man at least three times in the groin. After the third kick the man let go of her arm and fell to the ground, she said.
“I was just fighting back because I was scared,” the girl said, adding that once her assailant hit the ground she ran to her grandmother’s house and told her what had happened.
Her grandmother called the police.
Michael McCabe, undersheriff for Oakland County, said the girl did exactly what she should have done.
“She screamed and yelled and kicked. He went down and she ran away,” McCabe said. “Thank God she did that because who knows what would’ve happened.”
McCabe told WJBK the attempted abduction is the second such incident in that neighborhood in recent months.
In January, two black men in a light blue minivan were said to have tried to abduct two children as they were walking home from school about a block from where the most recent incident occurred.
The children — an 11-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy — told Oakland County authorities the van pulled up behind them.
“Hurry and grab them,” one of the men said, according to information the children gave to investigators.
WXYZ News reported at the time the children ran to a nearby community center where employees took them inside and called police.
The suspects, who were said to be wearing masks, were never caught.
The teen in the most recent incident said she didn’t get a good look at her attacker’s face but described him as a black man about 5 feet 9 inches tall and 180 pounds. He was wearing black pants and a black hooded sweatshirt, she said.
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