Woman Says She Was Car-Jacked, But Then Again... She Wasn't

Wauwatosa police take every call and complaint seriously, and especially so when one involves a threat of bodily harm.

But the constabulary hardly knows what to make of this one.

Plenty of officers were deployed Sunday after a woman ran breathlessly up to a bystander at 68th Street and Maple Terrace at 12:41 p.m. and said she'd just been carjacked by a man who threatened to shoot her.

The bystander she met, who was working outside his rental property on 68th  Street, let her use his cell phone to call 911. He then agreed, at her urgent request, to drive around the neighborhood looking for her car.

After a few minutes of futility, he decided it was more important to talk to the police, and he returned to 68th Street.

Officers were then interviewing the woman, who said she was going home from work to eat lunch when she stopped at a red light at Wisconsin and 76th – half a mile away – when a man at the bus stop there made eye contact with her.

He said, "Hi," she said, and then "I'm just looking."

Instead of driving on, she said, she immediately pulled to the curb and called her mother, upset about the encounter.  

Then, she said, the man walked up to her driver's window and tried to open her door.

Again, instead of driving away, she climbed across the seats and out her passenger door, she said, but the stranger met her on the other side of the car, stuck something hard into her ribs and said, "If you scream, I'll shoot you."

At that point, she said, she took off running and didn't stop until she found the Samaritan on 68th Street.

Police found her car unlocked, still running, with her purse and other belongings still present and undisturbed, back at 76th Street.

Officers did an area check and couldn't locate any suspect.

The woman said she might be able to identify the subject if she saw him again, and described him as a white male, 25 to 30 years old, 6 feet tall and wearing a gray sweater and a red baseball cap.