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SAWN-OFF STORY
This is one of those stories where if you are right nobody remembers and if you are wrong nobody forgets. It’s about a road rage incident which first became public on 3AW’s Breakfast Program yesterday. A terrifying story about a young mother, a motor-bike rider, a baby and a sawn-off shotgun.
People may have been surprised that I made no mention of it on my 3AW program yesterday. That’s because there were many aspects of this story that I, quite frankly, didn’t believe.
And I wasn’t surprised that the Herald Sun didn’t feature the story this morning when usually such a story about a young mother and baby terrorised by a shotgun-toting road rager would be on Page One.
Let’s briefly give the story as told by a woman calling herself ‘Lucy’ to the Breakfast guys and by Police Media in a release yesterday afternoon.
She was driving north along the Hume Highway, near Somerton, in heavy traffic about 5p.m. With her ‘little baby playing in the back seat’. She inadvertently cut off a motor bike. The enraged bike rider overtook her in the emergency lane, pulled in front of her car and stopped dead. How she didn’t run him over wasn’t explained. Then he turned, pointed a sawn-off double barrelled shotgun at her through the windscreen.
Lucy said she froze. Later she speculated that maybe he didn’t shoot because he saw the baby. She then swerved around him into the other lane and escaped. But he overtook her, she says, at 200 kilometers an hour on his small, sporty red motorbike and dodging in and out of the traffic disappeared. Must have been quite a rider. I’m not sure what he’d done with the shotgun by then.
There was also a truck that stopped in the middle lane behind her and that driver must have seen what was happening. With the bike stopped. Lucy stopped. The truck stopped. There must have been some peak hour traffic build-up but Police told us this afternoon that no witnesses had come forward.
The Police media release says ‘The rider is described as having fair skin, aged between 16 and 26 and wearing a dark coloured t-shirt and light coloured jeans. His helmet may have been of an open face design, or enclosed with the visor open.’ Lucy says she doesn’t remember if he was wearing a helmet or not.
The guy was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Where would he have hidden the shotgun which must have been in easy reach if he could produce it and aim it in seconds? A sawn-off shotgun has got to be 40-50 centimetres long. He wasn’t wearing a jacket to hide it. He wasn’t wearing bulky leathers.
As they used to say in the TV show Dragnet ‘There are eight million stories in this naked city’. The old Police reporter in me says this isn’t one of them.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008
