A mother and father have lived through a nightmare ordeal after their vehicle was carjacked from a service station with their two young children in the back seat.
The father was fuelling up the couple’s Nissan Pathfinder at a service station in Beenleigh south of Brisbane when the criminal pounced, pushing the mother out of the front passenger seat before speeding off.
CCTV footage of the incident shows the pair scrambling after the incident, the mother on the ground screaming “my kids” as the father ran towards the shop before re-entering the screen with his mobile phone to his ear.
The parents, who can’t be identified for legal reasons, were left worrying about the fate of their children for more than 15 minutes.
The couple were in a sense of shock, the father said.
“She (the mother) was really distraught,” he said.
”She was losing her marbles a bit. I was just in shock more than anything else.
“I didn’t know where to go from here.”
The CCTV footage shows the father trying to enter the vehicle’s passenger seat to stop the man before toppling back out of the car with his wife.
“From the force of the vehicle taking off, we both just fell to the ground,” he said.
Thankfully, the children, a two-year-old boy and ten-month-old girl were dropped at a nearby Woolworths a short time later unharmed.
“All he (the son) could say to me pretty much was that you know, ‘there was a bad man, and the bad man was angry’,” the father said.
Another vehicle’s dashcam footage shows the stolen pathfinder being driven erratically by the thief a short time later.
The man responsible for the carjacking is still to be located by police, and it is believed he attempted to steal another woman’s car just moments earlier at a nearby 7-Eleven, leaving the woman with minor injuries.